Portal:History of science

Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. These were variously called Uranverein (Uranium Club) or Uranprojekt (Uranium Project). The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended only a few months later, shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many notable German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) while continuing to fund the activity.

The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish as many researchers applied their talents to more pressing wartime demands. The most influential people in the Uranverein included Kurt Diebner, Abraham Esau, Walther Gerlach, and Erich Schumann. Schumann was one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. Diebner, throughout the life of the nuclear weapon project, had more control over nuclear-fission research than did Walther Bothe, Klaus Clusius, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, or Werner Heisenberg. Esau was appointed as Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's plenipotentiary for nuclear-physics research in December 1942, and was succeeded by Walther Gerlach after he resigned in December 1943. (Full article...)

This 1885 portrait of Louis Pasteur, by Albert Edelfelt, is a classic depiction of the pure scientist; the painting was emulated in print as well, and it adorns the cover of the first critical biography of the great chemist. Within his lifetime, Pasteur became an heroic figure within French culture, and historians' attempts to dispel some of the "Pasteurian myths" were initially met with strong resistance.

...that the travel narrative The Malay Archipelago, by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, was used by the novelist Joseph Conrad as a source for his novel Lord Jim?

...that the seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, along with their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes all formulated definitions of conatus, an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself?

...that according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (pictured), was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?

Maria Goeppert Mayer (German pronunciation: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɛʁt ˈmaɪ̯ɐ] ^ⓘ, née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit. (Full article...)

July 11:

• 1709 - Birth of Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, Swedish chemist (d. 1785)

• 1735 - Mathematical calculations suggest that it was on this day that Pluto moved from the ninth to the eighth most distant planet from the Sun for the last time before 1979

• 1893 - The first cultured pearl is obtained by Kokichi Mikimoto

• 1909 - Death of Simon Newcomb, American astronomer and mathematician (b. 1835)

• 1916 - Birth of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 2002)

• 1924 - Birth of César Lattes, Brazilian physicist (d. 2005)

• 1931 - Birth of Tullio Regge, Italian physicist

• 1950 - Birth of Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani nuclear physicist

• 1967 - Birth of Jeff Corwin, American naturalist and TV personality