JF Ptak Science Books

An Unusual Engraved Portrait of Isaac Newton

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Of the many portraits painted of Isaac Newton, the vast majority of them came after his death--some were fanciful, some were based on recollection, and others were based on the few examples that have survived painted of him in life.  This happened quite a bit--even someone as esteemed as his semi-counter-rival, the great Robert Hooke, received no attention at all from portraitists during his lifetime.

I found this lovely portrait of Newton--a miniature, nearly--an engraving by Laderer after the 1726 painting by John Vanderbank, made just  a year before his death, and almost 40 years after he ascent to great fame. 

It is an image I don't see very often.  

The original is about 1.5x1 inch on a 10x7 inch sheet, and printed in ca. 1820-30.  I'm unsure of the engraving's origin. The full version is below.

THere's also this engraving, made of the same painting, and executed in the 1830's, that shows Newton in a little less flattering light--at least here he looks as though he has some decent age on him. 

A Skelton Key of Blank Physicists, 1946

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The Future of Nuclear Science, Princeton University Bicentennial Series, Series I Conference I (1946), with a forward by the director of the conference, E.P Wigner, is mostly just a short (36-page) introduction to the conference, though it does contain a very nice and not commonly seen photograph of the conference's participants. Of particular interest is the accompanying ghost/outline guide to identifying the group, which seems to take on its own life when viewed out-of-context.

It is a considerably heavyweight group of physicists--among them are Hofstadter, S.K. Alison, Kistiakowsky, Ladenburg, W.J. Eckert, L.A. Turner, R.H. Dicke, E. Amaldi, Urey, Conant, Tolman, Pais, Turkevich, Condon, Wheeler, Smyth, Chandrasekhar, Weisskopf, Seaborg, Wilson, Morrison, Veblen, Bargmann, Feynman, Van Vleck, Rabi, Eisenhart, Compton, Kramers, Dirac, DuBridge, Bridgman, Fermi, Blackett, and others.  It is a wonderful photograph:

Here's a relatively-random detail featuring (bottom left -to-right) Compton, Kramers, Dirac, Bohr, plus (middle left-to-right) Margenau, Bargmann, Feynman, Harnwell, Tate, and (third row) Wheeler, Smyth, and Chandrasekhar.  This was an extraordinary group. 

Full text via Hathi Trust via Cornell University.

 

James Clerk Maxwell, on Himself ("a profession was not necessary to a useful life")

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Around 1870 James Clerk Maxwell--one of the great minds in the history of modern physics--responded to a request by Francis Galton to fill out  a questionnaire for Galton's work on the characteristics of people-of-genius, and published as English Men of Science, their Nature and Nurture (1874).

This is a set of Maxwell's responses about himself, as well as his mother and father: 

A Great Letter to the Editor & a Major Advance in Particle Physics

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2091

James Chadwick--the discoverer of the neutron and leading Brit investigator in the Manhattan Project--announced his great discovery in the form of a letter-to-the-editor.  Of course, this was a letter to the editor of Nature--not exactly the Billboard Breeze of Sumpin', Montana, or the NYT or WSJ for that matter--where letters like this were more a quick way to get experimental results announced quickly, a rapid-publication device in the days when the scientific weekly was the quickest way of getting news out the fellow researchers. 

But, no matter--it is still a short introduction to a long idea, not quite as romantic as the lede implies.  Chadwick's  "Possible Existence of a Neutron", appeared in Nature on 27 February 1932. It takes up a tidy and compact  1.25 columns, all on one page (312) of this issue of the journal. It is in a sort of imaginary "tradition" of great letters-to-the-editor, like the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper ("The Origin of Chemical Elements", on the stuff of the Big Bang, a 1948 paper published in the journal Physical Review that worked out the basis for the formation of particles in the universe), another instance of a major scientific announcement being made as a "simple" presentation to the journal's editor. 

Quantum Mechanics and Physics Timelines

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Reference Tool series

[Max Planck, 1933]

Quantum Mechanics Chronologies

• Quantum Theory Timeline  //  Particle Adventure  About 50 entries, no bibliographic data ; simple introductory timeline.  http://www.particleadventure.org/other/history/quantumt.html  .

• Timeline of Quantum Mechanics  Probably 150 entries and 77 bibliographic notes including links to the original articles.  Pretty nice.  The "History of QM" wiki entry is fairly basic. (Wiki) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_mechanics

• Good introductory timeline from Northwestern U along with annotation (1814-1927) http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/Ideas/quantum_timeline.html

• AlphaCenturi Quantum Timeline  Short timeline but picks up James Franck in 1914.  http://www.alpcentauri.info/quantum_mechanics_timeline.html

• TimeRime. Kind of a short, splashy presentation with only a dozen dates or so. http://timerime.com/en/timeline/138786/Quantum+Theory/

• Chronology of Quantum Mechanics, Molecular, Atomic, Nuclear, and Particle Physics http://www.3rd1000.com/chronology/chrono3.htm

And this, a chronology of general physics, with a good selection in QM: 

• Big but incomplete, which means you'll have to get the book itself:  Chronology of Science by Lisa Rezende.  Google book, here.

 

Fine Portrait of James Clerk Maxwell

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

"...the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."--Einstein on Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), only 48 when he died, was one of the supreme science minds of modern history, a giant among giants, a scientist who performed the second-greatest unification of physics after Newton. 

Source: "Scientific Worthies, XVIII--James Clerk Maxwell."  In: Nature, 27 October 1881, the weekly issue on page 601 (though a single page the article runs a tight 1500 words) with the fine steel engraved portrait of Maxwell and the article occupying pp 601-602.

[The original is offered for sale here.]

The published works of James Clerk Maxwell, from the Maxwell Foundation, here along with a chronological arrangement, here.  His last will and testament, here. Internet Archive collection o fMaxwell's online works, here. And lastly a short biography from Wolfram Research, here.

The Work of Murray Gell-Mann

I've posted a variety below of the important papers of Murray Gell-Mann (b. 1929, his bio via Nobel.org is here) as they appear in Murray Gell-Mann, Selected Papers, and published by World Scientific in 2010.  Each has a link to the original paper.    [Source:  Google Books] Following this is a re-post of the full list of publications by Gell-Mann as presented on the website of the Santa Fe Institute.  All I've done here is copy the somewhat-difficult-to-read text into a table to differentiate the entries and make it a friendlier document (for me, at least). Again, this is solely the work of those at the Santa Fe Insitute.

The Top 100 Cited Papers in the "Reviews of Modern Physics"

JF Ptak Science Books    Reference Tool Series

I found recently a very interesting and useful table of the top-100 cited papers published in the Reviews of Modern Physics (published to 1988, see pp 10-12). It was collected and generated by Dr. Eugene Garfield and for me displays some pretty valuable information. It is arranged alphabetically by author, and since it is in a pretty static format I generated from the converted pdf file an index showing the papers arranged by the number of citations together with the last name of the author and the placement in the RMP--unfortunately the quality of the original pdf was such that it restricted using the title of the paper because it would have resulted in re-entering all of the data. So to use this new table just refer to the original pdf and you'll be able to quickly find all of the rest of the bibliographic information. 

R.P. Feynman Publications, 1938-1999

Many thanks to Dr. Hagen Kleinert (University of Berlin) for creating this bibliography.  The original can be found on his website here. 

1938
[1] With M.S. Vallarta. Scattering of cosmic rays by the stars of a galaxy. Phys Rev 55: 340-343.

1939
[2] Forces in molecules, Phys. Rev. 56: 340-34

The Only Photograph of Einstein's Derivation of the Mass-Energy Equivalence?

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[The equation in question is at bottom-left; full explanation here.]

I came across an article while researching a work by H.P. Robertson--Lectures on Relativity (Princeton 1935)--and it is much more interesting than what I was actually looking for.  It seems that in the history of Einstein working his famous E = mc² on blackboards around the world that there are no surviving pictures of the man and the chalk and the equation. 

In their article "Einstein's 1934 Two-Blackboard Derivation of Energy-Mass Equivalence" (found in the American Journal of Physics, 75 (11), November 2007, pp 978-983) David Topper and Dwight Vincent of the University of Winnipeg sort it out and reproduce a not-sharp (but essential!) halftone newspaper file photo clipping showing Einstein doing just this, using two blackboards for the derivation of the equivalence of mass and energy during a public lecture in Pittsburgh in 1934. 

In their short excellent article they do a fine job of discussing the history of these sorts of images as well as provide a nice description of what's ont he blackboard.  I urge a reading of the full article found here. 

Einstein--(A) List of Complete Publications; (B) Most Often Cited Papers, & (C) Contemporary Reviews (D) In the Annalen der Physik

JF Ptak Science Books   Reference Post

• Below are three quck reference lists regading publications of Albert Einstein. Section A is a complete list of his works; Section B, a list of hi smost ofte-cited papers; Section C is a collection of some contemporary reviews of papers published 1904-1920; Section D is a listing of Einstein papers in the Annalen der Physik

A) Quick Complete Publications of Albert Einstein, Listed Chronologically.

[Titles are in English]

1901 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 4(3):513-523
Conclusions from the capillarity occurrences       

1902 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 8(8):798-814
The thermodynamic theory of the potential differences between metals and complete dissociation solutions of their salts and a electrical method towards the probing of molecular power      

Reference Tool: a Short and Handy Timeline of Quantum Mechanics, 1900-1962

A Short Timeline of Quantum Mechanics, 1900-1962

1900 Johannes Rydberg refines the expression for observed hydrogen line wavelengths.

1900 Max Planck states his quantum hypothesis and blackbody radiation law1902 Philipp Lenard observes that maximum photoelectron energies are independent of illuminating intensity but depend on frequency.

1902 Theodor Svedberg suggests that fluctuations in molecular bombardment cause the Brownian motion.

1905 Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effect.

Reference Tool: Handy List of Nobel Prizes Awarded in Physics

(For some reason I couldn't find a simple listing of Nobel Prize winners listed alphabetically--so here one is. This is linked to the Nobel site which of course has an exhaustive listing of winners and reasons for the award; this list is a simple thumbnail of the winners.)

Note: about halfway down is a descending list of recipients with the Nobel Foundation's reasons for the awards.  All text in the descrption for the award is from the Nobel Foundation site.  (This ends/begins in 1997--I'll get this up to date shortly.) 

For videos of the recipients' Nobel lectures, see here.

Abrikosov, Alexei A. 2003
Alferov, Zhores I. 2000
Alfven, Hannes 1970
Alvarez, Luis W. 1968
Anderson, Carl David 1936
Anderson, Philip W. 1977

Inside Looking Out: Ernst Mach vs. the Hudson River

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1913

I cannot think of another illustration by a scientist or philosopher who attempts to explain their own, literal, view of the world and then offer what this looks like to the reader from inside his own head, looking out through his own eye.  That's exactly what Ernst Mach is doing right here on page 15 of his influential book Die Analyse der Empfindungen,  the fourth German edition ("The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Pyschical", published in Jena in 1903).

There is nothing in this world for Mach that is not admissible to the human brain that is not empirically verifiable--that is, the world is nothing but awash in sensation and that sensation itself forms part of the experience of, well, experience. I've actually never been interested in the philosophy of science, and this is one of the reasons why.  Nevertheless I boldly break through my own prejudices to enjoy this phenomenally original image, drawn from the inside of Mach's working mind, looking out through his eye socket, over his mustache, under his eyebrow, around his nose, out across his body and then leaping into the rest of the world.  I think he does make his point about the essential nature of the observer. And much like the classic Steinberg New Yorker cartoon of the world view of the New Yorker (of course this includes only Manhattan), I know some number of people who have transposed their bodies much like Herr Mach into the Steinberg map--except that their worldview ends basically at the Hudson River (Mach's feet) with the rest of the world being the sliver out there beyond the river (Mach's window) until you go 359 degrees around the world to get back to the East River (and back inside Mach's noggin).  It is an unusual world view to have, but someone has to have it so that we can at least identify it so. 

I just like the picture.   

(Section 10, describing this image,  with translation by C M Williams and Sydney Waterlow from the blessed Dover people in 1959):

"The considerations just advanced, expressed as they have been in an abstract form, will gain in strength and vividness if we consider the concrete facts from which they flow. Thus, I lie upon my sofa. If I close my right eye, the picture represented in the accompanying cut is presented to my left eye In a frame formed by the ridge of my eyebrow, by my nose, and by my moustache, appears a part of my body, so far as visible, with its environment. My body differs from other human bodies - beyond the fact that every intense motor idea is immediately expressed by a movement of it, and that, if it is touched, more striking changes are determined than if other bodies are touched - by the circumstance, that it is only seen piecemeal, and, especially, is seen without a head. If I observe an element A within my field of vision, and investigate its connexion with another element B within the same field, I step out of the domain of physics into that of physiology or psychology, provided B, to use the apposite expression of a friend of mine made upon seeing this drawing, passes through my skin. Reflexions like that for the field of vision may be made with regard to the province of touch and the perceptual domains of the other senses."

Index of the Scientific Papers of Erwin Schroedinger, 1914-1955

1914 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 44 (14): 916-934
Schrodinger E
The dynamics of elastically coupled point systems

1914 PHYSIKALISCHE ZEITSCHRIFT 15: 79-86
Schrodinger E
Acidity which produces interference patterns with x-rays.