@williamthomas
Director of Research in History, Policy, and Culture at the American Institute of Physics. Author of Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960. Views expressed are my own.
Many good lines from philosopher/physicist Abner Shimony, who really carried the torch for Bell's theorem from 1964 to '68.
"The more I read it, the more brilliant it seemed. And I realized, ‘This is no kooky paper. This is something very great.’”
More on Shimony:
www.bu.edu/cphs/about/a...
In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we draw on oral histories conducted by the late Joan Bromberg to revisit the 1960s-era quest to do an experimental test of Bell's theorem.
At stake was whether quantum randomness and what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" are real phenomena. #HPS
Let us know when you get a "non, ce n'est pas possible."
web.archive.org/web/20090219...
Lee MacDonald’s The Royal Observatory, Greenwich is available online uclpress.co.uk/book/the-roy...
*Join us, so it's not *just* us!
A woman (Hertha Sponer) photographed in black and white, slightly blurry, weaking a white garment looking leftward at an experimental apparatus with wires, pipes, and glass bulbs.
Just us at AIP in Washington, DC, on Friday, March 20, as we welcome philosopher and historian Elise Crull for our first Lyne Starling Trimble public event of the year: "Hertha Sponer and the Path from Electron Diffraction to Wave/Particle Duality"
RSVP today: www.aip.org/history/elis...
Hard to say, but even when I had a VCR, I didn't think much about the spooling. It was just the term you used. Although, it is fun to think back to the video store admonition, "Please be kind, rewind." Totally foreign now to think about having to do that.
Asked the 13 y.o., without prompting a specific term, about what it means to go backward in a show or music, and she said "rewind."
A side by side image of Chien-Shiung Wu in the late 1950s, looking off to the side; and Irving Shaknov in uniform in Korea, standing with a local boy.
A subject of particular recent interest is the Wu-Shaknov experiment of 1949/50, which tested entanglement without (apparently) trying to. Its epistemological status vis-a-vis the later, better-known tests of Bell's theorem is something that deserves attention. Same with Kocher's '67 experiment.
In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, I look at the long journey of quantum entanglement from thought experiment to actual experiments, highlighting some recent historical work on the subject. (You maybe saw this in our print newsletter, but, if not, check it out. Or, hey, check it out again!)
A side point, but the motivating importance of the "myth" of the general strike, specifically, was central to Sorel's thinking about syndicalism over a century ago en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Ge...
This sent me to brush up on Einstein's "personality rights". These were litigated in the US in Hebrew University of Jerusalem v General Motors, wherein a CA judge ruled personality rights endure no more than 50 years after death. The case involved this pic:
More info: cdas.com/einstein-pub...
I am of the opinion that lore nerds should apply their passion to real history, which is categorically incapable of contradicting itself. Then they can get into productive disputes about contradictory sources and interpretive ambiguity. I am aware that this is unquestionably a monkey's paw wish.
I'm glad to see others thinking along these lines. At AIP we are developing formats that complement books and articles. Our weekly email newsletter is designed to maintain a steady cadence; our new history guides will emphasize non-linearity, supplementary materials, and search engine optimization.
Do historians focus too much on producing academic books? In her essay for our most recent volume @aileenfyfe.bsky.social her team's research project "Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: the social, cultural and economic history of a learned journal, 1665–2015"
In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, University of Padua PhD student Luca Campagnoni discusses his work with a newly discovered trove of materials related to cosmic ray physicist Bruno Rossi. It sheds new light on Rossi's expedition to Eritrea and his pre-World War II flight from Italy to the US.
Well, he and his wife should indeed be better known for their translation of Agricola's De Re Metallica
S: Breakfast will comprise a nutritious, filling, delicious combination of food
M: Breakfast will have a satisfaction score of "good" or better and shall be consumed daily
A: Good breakfasts are readily available
R: Breakfast is the cornerstone of productive work
T: Goal shall be achieved by 10am.
Here I feel it's worth pointing out that in opinion polls scientists have a 30-point trust advantage over journalists. While everyone has much to learn from everyone else, I want to hear much more about how journalists could learn about trust from scientists www.pewresearch.org/science/2023...
And, by the way, for more on Penrose's work on black holes, may I also recommend Dennis Lehmkuhl's recent @physicspip.bsky.social article "The Prediction and Interpretation of Singularities and Black Holes: From Einstein and Schwarzschild to Penrose and Wheeler"
In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, @tjowens.bsky.social interviews @patchenbarss.bsky.social about how he researched and wrote The Impossible Man, a biography of mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.
It is a good point. I broke my own book down into 30+ chapters, some only a few pages long, so the point of each wouldn't get lost. I also think about the amount of time I've spent with a metaphorical magnifying glass and tweezers picking the history out of books preoccupied with the argument.
This is just unquestionably true, mainly because books are supposed to have a main point. So, scholars will spend many years of their lives essentially organizing their work around the demonstration of a single point. How many side points, how much documentation, gets sacrificed to that end?
HEP funding is another great chart. This is from DOE. Now, the SSC funding bump here was largely going to construction, but there were a lot of marooned physicists, and, anecdotally, many ended up on Wall Street.
That's my big question! My naive guess is it involved a shift in fashions; after the Super Collider was cancelled, physics wasn't really considered a hot field while biotech was all the rage. Meanwhile, women continued to make progress. The field-by-field breakdown you want would be helpful here.
Chart of Physics doctorates earned from 1978 to 2024, with a steady increase in the number of women but overarching trends closely tracking the number of men earning PhDs
Chart showing doctorates earned in astronomy from 1978 to 2024 with women making steady gains and closing in on parity, and an overarching increase in number of PhDs earned linked to the increasing numbers of women entering the field.
The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.
I'm really happy to have this long-awaited guide up and running. Michel and Gernot did a great job of thinking about how a web site can complement a book chapter. We're busily working away on both history and policy guides that will follow its example. Please have a look!
Washington has a rich scientific history! Come hear Greg, Teasel, and Sara talk about it at AIP on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 26.