SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology – serie

This book presents the first detailed account of Werner Heisenberg’s failed attempt to find a theory of everything in the autumn of his career. It further investigates what we can learn from his failure in relation to the search for a final theory of physics, an endeavour that continues to define research in fundamental physics to this day.

Quantum mechanics – the grandiose theory that describes nature down to the submicroscopic level – was first formulated in Göttingen in 1925. How did this come about and why is it that Göttingen became the pre-eminent location for a revolution in physics? This book is the first to investigate the wide range of factors that were pivotal for quantum physics to be established in Göttingen. These include the process of generational change of physics professors, the hopes of mathematicians seeking new fields of research, and a new understanding of the interplay of experiment, theory and philosophy.The other books in the four-volume collection address the beginnings of quantum physics research at Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. These works emerged from an expansive study on the quantum revolution as a major transformation of physical knowledge undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Fritz Haber Institute (2006–2012).Formore on this project, see the dedicated Feature Story, The Networks of Early Quantum Theory, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/feature-story/networks-early-quantum-theory.

The book tells the unique story of WEIZAC, an early computer built by a “new nation” in the early 1950s. It was created in Israel, even though the feasibility of this project was actually close to null when it was initially conceived, in 1946, and, unlike most of the early computer projects, was privately financed mainly by the Jewish world community. The book draws on a wealth of documents and historical insights to reveal the processes and powers that led to the successful completion of the project and, as well as its actual impact on scientific activities in Israel, and on the rise of a local computing community.Based on archival data, the book shows how a synergy of personal dedication together with an organizational and national mission that links the Zionist vision with science and technology for the Jewish people helped to achieve a well-defined goal.The book offers intriguing insights and refreshing perspectives to all readers interested in the Zionist movement or inthe history of computing.

On the road toward a history of turbulence, this book focuses on what the actors in this research field have identified as the “turbulence problem”.

Through a philosophical analysis of Dawes’ ideas and policies, the book provides a new approach to arrive at a better understanding of an important historical process. This book clarifies the impact of philosophical ideas on historical conceptions, and by studying Dawes, also addresses the reflection behind a major historical process.

This book is a historical analysis of the quantum mechanical revolution and the emergence of a new discipline from the perspective, not of a professor, but of a recent or actual Ph.D. student just embarking on an uncertain academic career in economically hard times. Quantum mechanics exploded on to the intellectual scene between 1925 and 1927, with more than 200 publications across the world, the majority of them authored by young scientists under the age of 30, graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. The resulting theory was a collective product that no single authority could claim, but it had a major geographical nod – the Copenhagen Institute of Theoretical Physics – where most of the informal, pre-published exchange of ideas occurred and where every participant of the new community aspired to visit. A rare combination of circumstances and resources – political, diplomatic, financial, and intellectual – allowed Niels Bohr to establish this “Mecca” of quantum theory outside of traditional and more powerful centres of science. Transitory international postdoctoral fellows, rather than established professors, developed a culture of research that became the source of major innovations in the field. Temporary assistantships, postdoctoral positions, and their equivalents were the chief mode of existence for young academics during the period of economic crisis and post-WWI international tensions. Insecure career trajectories and unpredictable moves through non-stable temporary positions contributed to their general outlook and interpretations of the emerging theory of quantum mechanics.This book is part of a four-volume collection addressing the beginnings of quantum physics research at the major European centres of Göttingen, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich; these works emerged from an expansive study on the quantum revolution as a major transformation of physical knowledge undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Fritz HaberInstitute (2006–2012). For more on this project, see the dedicated Feature Story, The Networks of Early Quantum Theory, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/feature-story/networks-early-quantum-theory

In this book, the author pays tribute to Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), a mathematician with revolutionary ideas, whose work on the theory of integration, the Fourier transform, the hypergeometric differential equation, etc. contributed immensely to mathematical physics. The text concentrates in particular on Riemann’s only work on prime numbers, including ideas – new at the time – such as analytical continuation into the complex plane and the product formula for entire functions. A detailed analysis of the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function is presented. The impact of Riemann’s ideas on regularizing infinite values in field theory is also emphasized.This revised and enhanced new edition contains three new chapters, two on the application of Riemann’s zeta-function regularization to obtain the partition function of a Bose (Fermi) oscillator and one on the zeta-function regularization in quantum electrodynamics. Appendix A2 has been re-written to make the calculations more transparent. A summary of Euler-Riemann formulae completes the book.

This book examines the most important Czech women philosophers and scientists. It highlights the lives and achievements of a group that has often not received the recognition they deserve. Chapters provide a systematic description and critical evaluation of the impact these women had on the history of philosophy and science.After an opening chapter on the status of women philosophers and scientists in the period before 1820, the book explores the role women played in the 19th century rise of Czech culture (Czech National Revival). The following chapter then introduces the situation of Czech women philosophers and scientists in the 20th century. The authors base the material on analysis of key works and the characteristics of contemporary debates in which these women participated.The volume describes the complex conditions of women in Czech history in relation to the position of learned women in other European countries. The authors also emphasize their link tothe historical background. This encompassing coverage helps provide readers with a richer understanding of these important women and the period in which they lived. Academicians and the general public alike will also learn about the political and social limitations these women faced and the influence of historical conditions on their work.

This book traces the history of Arnold Sommerfeld’s famous “nursery of theoretical physics” at the University of Munich and demonstrates the centrality of developing personal and institutional networks for the emergence of quantum theory.

This book explores Albert Einstein’s move to Berlin and the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics under his directorship. Einstein’s call to Berlin was supported by a group of prominent physicists, including Fritz Haber, Walter Nernst, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Emil Warburg, and the young astronomer Erwin Freundlich, in the expectation that Einstein and the institute would take the lead in advancing quantum physics in its early phase. Examining both the abortive attempt and the successful opening of the institute in 1917, it also discusses in detail the institute’s activities up to 1922, when Einstein relinquished the directorship, as well as his reasons for stepping down. The final chapter evaluates the institute’s activities and its role in the advancement of physics. In the end, the institute only partially fulfilled the expectations of its promoters because of the waning interest in quantum physics on the part of its director and board, and also because of Einstein’s refusal to exert scientific leadership. The book is part of a series of publications in the SpringerBriefs series on the early network of quantum physics. The other books in the four-volume collection address the beginnings of quantum physics research at Göttingen, Copenhagen, and Munich. These works emerged from an expansive study on the quantum revolution as a major transformation of physical knowledge undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Fritz Haber Institute (2006–2012).For more on this project, see the dedicated Feature Story, The Networks of Early Quantum Theory, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/feature-story/networks-early-quantum-theory

The book provides a background, demonstrating how theory, methodology, and technique are always articulated in historical research, and will appeal to history students and researchers.

This book provides a fresh view on an important and largely overlooked aspect of the Euclidean traditions in the medieval mathematical texts, particularly concerning the interrelations between geometry and arithmetic, and the rise of algebraic modes of thought.

This book narrates the history of the initiation and development of elementary particle physics in India and by Indians, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. The thread is taken up with the introduction of Western science into India in the previous century.The contents are a mixture of science and biographies, interspersed with anecdotes and reflections on the historical and societal connections. The style is generally non-technical, with any technical issues explained and interwoven into the narrative.This book is of interest to scientists, to people with interest in science and the history of science, students curious about the initiation of science in the Indian context and about the famous Indian scientists, as well as administrators who wish to understand the roots of current Indian science, especially in the context of particle physics.

How can the physics of solids, the physics of nuclei, and elementary particle physics cross-fertilise in spite of the widely differing domains and energy scales they deal with?

This book discusses the changing conceptions about the relationship between geometry and arithmetic within the Euclidean tradition that developed in the British context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Its focus is on Book II of the Elements and the ways in which algebraic symbolism and methods, especially as recently introduced by François Viète and his followers, took center stage as mediators between the two realms, and thus offered new avenues to work out that relationship in idiosyncratic ways not found in earlier editions of the Euclidean text.Texts examined include Robert Recorde's Pathway to Knowledge (1551), Henry Billingsley’s first English translation of the Elements (1570), Clavis Mathematicae by William Oughtred and Artis Analyticae Praxis by Thomas Harriot (both published in 1631), Isaac Barrow’s versions of the Elements (1660), and John Wallis Treatise of Algebra (1685), and the English translations of Claude Dechales’ French Euclidean Elements (1685). This book offers a completely new perspective of the topic and analyzes mostly unexplored material. It will be of interest to historians of mathematics, mathematicians with an interest in history and historians of renaissance science in general.

This book provides new and critical perspectives on the internal development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (the PCSWA;

The audience of the book includes philosophers of science, philosophers of mathematics, scientists with philosophical interests, and students in philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.

This book describes the groundbreaking work of Chaim Leib Pekeris and his collaborators. Between 1955 and 1963 they used the first electronic computer built in Israel, the Weizmann Automatic Computer (WEIZAC), to develop powerful numerical methods that helped achieve new and accurate solutions of the Boltzmann equation, calculate energy levels of the helium atom, produce detailed geophysical and seismological models derived from the study of the free oscillations of the earth, and refine models used to predict meteorological phenomena and global oceanic tides. This book provides a unique account of the pioneering work of Chaim L. Pekeris in applied mathematics and explains in detail the background to the rise of the Weizmann Institute as a world-class center of scientific excellence. This hitherto untold story is of great interest to historians of twentieth-century science with special emphasis on the application of computer-assisted numerical methods in various branches of mathematical physics.

This book offers a history of the instrumentation used to materialize the early thought experiments devised in the Einstein-Bohr disputes over the foundations of quantum mechanics. It shows how the second world war and cold war fostered the development of materials, instruments, and systems that made it possible to create, manipulate, and detect single quantum systems, thus creating the material conditions for experiments in foundations of quantum mechanics and for a broad spectrum of experimental inquiries on the structure and properties of matter which underlay the creation of new research fields such as quantum optics, quantum information, and atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Discussing research and development performed in diverse contexts, this book reveals how physicists carried instruments, and the knowledge they embodied, through disciplinary and geographic frontiers to probe entanglement, a most intriguing feature of the quantum world.

This book examines education as a means to explore knowledge and literacy in the Old Babylonian period. It further employs a new method to research these topics. Contrary to numerous existing studies on the subject, the author examines elementary education globally, that is, in pursuit of Old Babylonian education in its entirety. Typically, education is examined in a piecemeal fashion. It's as if education centered on lexicography alone or mathematics alone. This work encompasses a view about educational content and knowledge systems, as opposed to only specific aspects or branches of them. In doing so, a characterization of institution and society is made possible allowing the work to open new general perspectives on Mesopotamian knowledge, literacy, and education.

The existence of the Italian abacus and German cossic algebra is at most taken note of but they are not read, leading to the idea that Viète's and Descartes' use of genuine symbolism (not only abbreviations), many unknowns, and abstract coefficients seem to be miraculous leaps.

This book is about the 1604 supernova and presents the translation of key documents discussing this astronomical event in Italy. Remnants of the explosion of the supernova, called today Kepler’s supernova, are still visible and are the subject of studies by modern observatories and discussions in the astrophysical community.

This book offers the first thorough-going account of the covert manuscript dissemination of a pivotal text in the history of early modern philosophy and science, namely the Traité de l’homme by René Descartes, completed in 1633 but published in printed form only in 1662 and 1664. This account serves as both introduction to and commentary upon the following transcription of a Latin handwritten translation of the treatise (Tractatus de homine a Cartesio) recently brought to the attention of scholars, and which was integral to such dissemination. Included is an apparatus of variants with respect to its first editions. Importantly, during its first dissemination the treatise fostered the development of medical theories based on mechanical ideas and is now increasingly at the centre of the attention of historians, thanks to the renewed appreciation of Descartes as a scientist rather than as a metaphysician. By developing an investigation taking into account not only professors and scientists, but also the importance of women, courtiers, publishers, soldiers, and the covert circulation of knowledge in the early modern age, this book contributes to the knowledge of scholars, students, and anybody interested in the early modern history of philosophy, science, intellectual history, and the history of the book in a crucial phase of the development of western thought.

This book offers a journey into the history of pioneering Israeli women in electronic computing and explores the impact these women had on the annals of Israeli computing history.

This open access book takes a fresh look at the nature and place of experience in premodern Islamic science.

This book explores the Galilean method for geolocation, placing it in historical and astronomical context. It bridges the techniques developed by the Greeks and medieval astronomers with later innovations like precision clocks, 20th-century wireless technology, and space-based navigation.The primary source is the twenty-volume National Edition of the Works of Galileo (published 1890-1909 by Antonio Favaro) and the update edited by Michele Camerota and Patrizia Ruffo in 2019, which includes previously unpublished documents on Galileo's negotiations with the Spanish government for selling his longitude-determining method at sea.This book inspired the 2024 "International Research Day in the World," focused on geolocation, organized by the Italian Permanent Delegation to International Organizations in Paris. In collaboration with Museo Galileo in Florence and Sorbonne Université, the event featured the exhibition “Galileo and Satellite Navigation,” showcased at the Pierre et Marie Curie Campus in Paris (June 13-28, 2024), and later at the Italian Institutes of Culture in Prague and Amsterdam, and at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.

This book fills a significant gap in the historiography of science by examining the overlooked contributions of non-astronomical personnel in the early National Astronomical Observatory of Chile.

This open access book investigates the epistemological concept of and the knowledge transfer interwoven with the moveable paper wheels found in medieval and early modern books—the so-called “volvelles.” The earliest known volvelles emerged in the mid-thirteenth century and were cut out and installed by the reader, often appearing in books dealing with astronomical subjects. The brain processes and remembers images more easily than words—the so-called “picture superiority effect”—especially if the images move, making volvelles a useful method to help students of the Quadrivium memorizing the heavenly movements, thus the composition of a device embedded within a text promises a comprehensive insight into the didactic concepts of early modern knowledge transfer. The Tractatus de Sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco (1195–1256), the standard university textbook for astronomy from the thirteenth until the seventeenth century, was particularly noted as containing volvelles of different kinds. The project “The Sphere,” located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, has collected a corpus of 359 printed De sphaera editions, building a promising basis for examining different volvelles and placing the results in a cultural context. These volumes had never been analyzed in detail before, nor was there such a large corpus that could provide a quantitative database for such an investigation. The results of the book show that a book and knowledge tradition as widespread as that of the Sphaera contained more than one third of volvelles and was used in university teaching in the early modern period. For historians, this sheds light on a new aspect of movable paper instruments in university didactics and book history in the early modern period.

This book analyzes a little-known but highly significant document that played a key role in early nuclear history: the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of March 1940. Prepared by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, refugee European physicists then at the University of Birmingham, this 10-page document described the physics behind the possibility of creating nuclear weapons utilizing a chain reaction with uranium-235, as well as the associated military, strategic, and ethical implications of such weapons. This remarkable manuscript made its way to the UK government's Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare, initiating the wartime British nuclear program. In 1943, the British effort merged with the US Manhattan Project; a number of native and naturalized British scientists including Frisch and Peierls, participated in the work that culminated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book examines the background to the memorandum, gives biographical sketches of Frisch and Peierls, describes how the memorandum came to be prepared, offers a detailed analysis of its physics content, outlines contemporary parallel events in the American nuclear program, and surveys the influence of the memorandum on the British and US wartime nuclear projects.