JF Ptak Science Books

On Getting "E=mc^2" Wrong, Twice in 1.5 Square Inches

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I think that this is the first time I've seen E=mc^2 incorrectly written in the same journal article. It occurs in a filler article in a 1950 slug filler piece in the New York Times (sorry I do not have the exact date/page) reporting on a church near Cologne incising its bell with the world's most famous equation but getting it wrong. The NYT reports that the equation was written as E=mr^2 instead of E-mc^2 [sic with the minus sign]. And there you have it. Highly unusual—this also comes just about two years after the first appearance of the equation that most kids know appeared in a published article by Einstein himself (in Science Illustrated, April 1946). Extraordinarily there is almost an earlier appearance of the equation in its most-known form in a kids' comic book called Science Comics (January 1946) where it is written on a blackboard in the background as Einstein lectures to an odd assortment of scientists. I've wondered where the writer/artist/ink/etc. got the equation from...perhaps the Smyth Report of 1945 (page 2)? I really don't know, though the equation is evidently first seen in a published paper by H.A. Lorentz in 1913. Maybe the comic books folks didn't have great access to that info back there in 1946. Anyway I just wanted to share this unlikely pair of misprints from 1950.

 

 

 

Statements by the Editor of Nature on Equality in the Sciences (1910).

JF Ptak Science Books  Overall Post 5143

This is a short note on an interesting series of reports in the venerable journal Nature (1911) regarding the status of women in the sciences.  These are three short articles (about 1750 words total) on the recent elections to a seat at the French Academy of Sciences in which Mme. Curie--one of two candidates--was not elected, her candidacy lost by vote to Edouard Branly. (Branly is an important figure in the history of wireless communications and inventor of the Branly coherer, but Curie was, well, far advanced of that.) The editorial staff of Nature took exception, reporting on the issue and the vote's unfortunate outcome. Being fairly familiar and having worked in Nature (for the 1869-1950 period) I was a little surprised by the summation of this short note in the 26 January issue. It is a strong message, at least so far as scientific and other intellectual endeavors are concerned. (Women will not get the full vote in G.B. Until 1928, achieving partial victory in 1918, though the vote was limited then to women 30+ with adequate property.) Still, I take this as a significant statement from Nature, even if it is limited to a short article in the "Notes" section of the weekly. I cannot recall other early pro-equality stances like this outside of a few articles here and there in support of women being able to attend classes at major universities, though not being able to receive academic credit for them. All caveats included, I find the Nature article to be a remarkable statement for the time. Perhaps someone out there with experience in this field will be able say whether these statements are actually as early as I think they are.  

Here's the conclusion of the 26 January article:

"As scientific work must ultimately be judged by its merit,

and not by the nationality or sex of its author, we believe
that the opposition to the election of women into scientific
societies will soon be seen to be unjust and detrimental
to the progress of natural knowledge. By no pedantic
reasoning can the rejection of a candidate for member-
ship of a scientific society be justified if the work done
places the candidate in the leading position among other
competitors. Science knows no nationality, and should
recognise no distinction of sex, colour, or creed among
those who are contributing to its advancement. Believing
that this is the conclusion to which consideration of the
question must inevitably lead, we have confidence that the
doors of all scientific societies will eventually be open to
Women on equal terms with men."

By the way, Curie was never elected to the French Academy of Science, though she did receive membership to the Academie Nationale de Medicine...in 1922. She had already received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903, and would be awarded the prize again in chemistry a few months after she lost this 1911 vote to the Academy. (Perhaps the "creed" part of the "sex. colour, or creed" pronouncement above referenced certain elements circulating the story that Curie was Jewish?)

Notes:

Three issues of  Nature, London, Macmillan & Co., 1910, volume 85.  Including: "The Admission of Women to the French Academies", pg 342 (full column, about 800 words), 12 January, in the issue #2150, pp 329-362. WITH: "The Admission of Women to the Paris Academy of Sciences", in 19 January, pp 372-373 pp 363-396, issue 2151. AND WITH: [Women's Rights], a 400-word contribution to the "Notes" section of 26 January issue no. 2152 pg 412-413 in the issue of pp 397-430. It is in the third contribution, the "Notes" section, that contains the strongest statement by the editor of Nature on the equality (at least in the sciences and intellectual pursuit) of sex, race, and religion. 

Albert Messiah in Berchtesgaden (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2881

I recently unboxed (after a long and deep in-box slumber) the classic two-volume work Quantum Mechanics by Albert Messiah. It was published in French in 1959 and soon found its way into English in 1961 (and 1962), and was a staple in the studies of two generations of physicists.

I had no idea of Messiah's background, which is extraordinary. I learned that he was accept to the IAS (Princeton) with only a high school education—this was due to Messiah (1921-2013) having spent his formative years from 1940 to 1945 fighting and killing Nazis. He heard Petain on the radio announcing that the gentlemanly thing to do for much-fallen-France in 1940 was to lay down arms, which to Messiah was the clarion call to resistance. He also refers to Petain as an imbecile. He recalls Petain intoning a vainglorious "...entre soldats et dans l'honneur, il fallait cesser le combat, etc. etc." , and that he does not recall this "stupidity" being much shared at the time ("...cette stupidité n'était pas tellement partagé à l'époque.")  This was indeed his path, as he joined the Resistance and fought for five years.

Here are a few interesting responses to questions put to Messiah at the Ecole Polytechnique in January 2009 regarding his time during WWII:

On a question of the lack of use of armor in 1940, Messiah says it simply was that French command sucked. (“Tout simplement parce que le commandement militaire français était un peu nul, c'est tout.”) Mediocrity was the ruler by which things were measured, and in general is very well spread. (“La médiocrité est une chose qui finalement est relativement répandue.”)

The people who won the war, and the reason why the Resistance was successful, were those who could think and stand out from the crowd. (“Parce que l'histoire justement est faite par les gens qui se démarquent de ça, des gens qui réfléchissent et qui éventuellement prennent des risques, c'est ce qui a donné la Résistance d'ailleurs, des gens qui prennent des risques mais qui ne vont pas dans le sens de l'histoire.”)

At the end of the interview Messiah relates being among the first to occupy Hitler's residence/seat of government in Berchtesgaden in May, 1945. He found it very amusing and ironic that Hitler's place would in the end by occupied by a Jew. (“...le malheureux Hitler a eu la malchance de voir son repaire occupé par un Juif.”) 

And a Jew named "Messiah" at that.

• Read the full interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20110617204534/http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/0/56/58/59/Texte-Messiah.pdf
• Obituary in Physics Today https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.4.2552/full/

Measuring Civilization by Height (1919)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Sharing space in the January 1920 issue of The Scientific Monthly with two significant papers is an unusual data visualization in James Breasted's article "The Origins of Civilization".  Leading the issue off is the wonderfully-presented and important paper ("Defects Found in Drafted Men") by C.B. Davenport and A.G. Love, which is a remarkable display of an enormous amount of data on the health of young men in the U.S. presented in a graphical display, the results of medical examinations of millions entering military service during WWI. Following this is a report by Sir Joseph Thompson ("The Deflection of Light by Gravitation and the Einstein Theory of Relativity") on the gravity/eclipse/relativity experiment in May 1919, which he referred to as  "the greatest achievement in the history of human thought". And then comes the Barbarism/Civilization dataviz of the Breasted article.  I'm having a bit of fun with this at Breasted's expense, as it looks as though he is measuring the progress of Barbarism to Civilization and the subsequent increases in culture to the depths/heights of monuments for the dead, from sand pit to pyramid, 4000-2800 BCE:

[The text here becomes clearer when expanded.]

It is an arresting image, to be sure, but the direction it takes seems a little suspect to me. In any event, I reproduce it here for general enjoyment.

The Earliest Appearance of "Einstein" in the "Physical Review"?

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

I set out to see when the first mention of "Einstein" occurs in the Physical Review to vaguely see how he was presented in what was even then in its first few decades of existence the premier U.S. physics journal. It is well known that he doesn't publish a paper in the journal until 1931, and then publishes "only" two more papers there (the EPR paper in 1935 and then the Einstein-Rosen bridge (the wormhole) paper in 1937). There was one other small contribution as a letter to the editor in 1952, but that was it. (There have been many papers written on his anti-interest in publishing in the Physical Review so I won't go into that right now.) I had just discussed the first appearance of a relativity paper in the Physical Review, found in the bibliography by Maurice Lecat (1929), which spots 1908 as the first effort published in the journal, though of course this doesn't necessarily answer the first "Einstein" appearance. According to my searches on the American Physical Society Physical Review site, the first time Einstein's name is mentioned in the PR is in the May 1, 1914 issue, and then only 11 more times to 1919.  Unfortunately the 1914 record is definitely not the first time E is mentioned, as just about the fist paper on relativity published in the PR does mention him by name in January 1909. (This is an abstract of a paper given by G. Lewis and R. Tolman in vol 28 1909 p 150.) So I'm not all that sure what this means, except that it seems unlikely that this sort of word search is an accurate (or definitive) tool--and I'm pretty sure that I can't access hoped-for easy answers answers to these questions.

In any event, Einstein doesn't have much of an existence in the Physical Review until his big year of 1916¹, and then again another uptick following the verification experiment of the eclipse of May 28, 1919. It seems though that the major amount of fame and acknowledgment comes in the popular press, where Einstein becomes EINSTEN after the eclipse proofs. As a side note Einstein had no notice whatsoever in the New York Times until June 1919, at which time the massive coverage of him as the New & Improved Newton begins. 

I don't have much of anywhere to go with this post, but I thought I'd at least share what I found, faulty as it probably is.  As a limp distraction from my inconclusive searches, here below are a couple of examples of early humorous treatments of Einstein, found in the pages of Punch, or the London Chiaravari, 1919-1921; the full results aren't in yet, but it seems as though Einstein has more mentions in the 1920s in this satirical/entertainment magazine than he does in the Physical Review. I haven't done supplementary searches in the databases of other journals/magazines/newspapers yet, though I will if this question of the earliest Einstein appearance in the Physical Review hasn't left me. 

Scarce Collection of Portraits of Physicists, 1908

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This scarce publication--Bildnisse zeitgennossischer Physiker--is a collection of about 320 portraits of leading physicists, collected together as an homage to Viktor von Lang on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  The book was made to look like a family portrait album, resembling stiff cardboard pages that would have open places in the pages for a collection of cartes des visites to be slid into place via at slot at the bottom of the window. The physicist are from Germany, France, the UK, Spain, the U.S., Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Japan, and a few other countries.  Interesting to note here are the three portraits of women physicists: Margaret Maltby (Barnard, and first woman to receive a doctorate from a German university); A. Serdobinskaja (St. Petersburg); and O. Steindler (Vienna).

Lang (1838-1921, one of the founders of crystal physics and from 1865 to 1909 (!) the director of the Physikalisches Kabinett in Vienna) is listed in some references as the author though I’m pretty certain that the work was edited by someone else and presented to Lang as an appreciation for his long contribution to science. There is also no mention of a place of publication.

There are only four copies of this book found in WorldCat, and I only found a handful of the published photos online, so I thought to reproduce the book in its entirety Each section is expandable; the images were scanned at 200dpi so I think they will stand up nicely for individual reproduction. 

The First Imagery of Einstein with "E=mc^2" Appears in...a Comic Book?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2782

After years of interest in the development of the atomic bomb and the half+-century of physics and chemistry that went into it, the question was put to me as to when the bomb's use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki first appeared in a comic book. (It was potentially interesting to see how long it took  to see the effects of the bomb depicted to the very popular youth culture.) That led to an unexpectedly long and not very satisfying search for what turned out to be not a trivial answer. I'm not telling that story here now because the middle parts of the search are still a little unsorted--there was however another curious and provoking bit that popped up in the latest installment of the question,  found in what I think is the issue of this "first" comic book appearance of the use of the atomic bomb.

Tucked inside this comic was an odd though not terribly wrong description of some of the background physics to the bomb. Amidst some fawning (?) and for no obvious reason highly caricatured images of physicists there appeared a crudely-rendered Einstein, and in his second panel, with his second blackboard, we see the The Equation, or almost so, appearing perhaps as   "E=mc_2^" or "E=mc2" [sic]. What seems to me to be the fact of the matter is that the equation that every schoolchild knows was not a very famous face to the great idea for nearly half a century, and nearly 25 years after Einstein received his Nobel (though that was not for relativity), because it just doesn't show up. Long story short with a new subset, it seems to me that the very first time that Einstein publishes using this equation is not until the first issue of Science Illustrated,  in his article "E=mc² the Most Urgent Problem of Our Time", in April 1946.

[Image sources above and below: Science Comics, vol 1/1, January 1946, from the wonderful website Comic Books Plus http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=15937.  Also it is worth noting that the Enola Gay isn't drawn very well, with extraneous stuff on the fuselage, and is also flying the wrong direction over Hiroshima and is too low...that's all done for the sake of art, but, still, it ain't right.]

It didn't seem possible that it took so long for the equation to be published under Einstein's name, but it appears that this is the case. The theory appears with much else in Einstein's miracle year of 1905 (where it was written as a sentence and not as a formula), and there are numerous other representation of the idea of mass-energy equivalence, but so far as Einstein writing it in its most recognizable notation, publishing it under his name, it looks like the first appearance comes years later.

The equation seems not quite right here in the comic book, and of course it is a comic book characterization of Einstein who is writing it and not Einstein himself, so it seems that this is a curiosity and little else...except when you wonder where the comic book writer/inkman/artist was exposed to the equation so that he might include it in the story?  This must be a shadow of something else, obviously, though not a shadow thrown directly by Einstein. (Another twist came in July 1946 when Time magazine used an image of Einstein and a mushroom cloud on their cover, with E=mc² written onto the mushrooming cloud. This is "close" but then again, not really--also it appears after the publication of our comic book and Science Illustrated.)

Just a year earlier there was an appearance of "E=mc² in Henry DeWolf Smyth's Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945, right there on page 2, in the introduction. (It was published months earlier in several formats by the U.S. government, though the Princeton 1945 edition reached more readers.)

This part of the story also has to wait to be told because I haven't quite got the timeline down for the E=mc² equation exactly as it appears and not written/published by Einstein, the earliest example that I have found thus far is 1929 (below). Today's entry on this matter is more thinking-out-loud than anything else. 

I guess the bigger question is: does it matter that E=mc² doesn't appear until much later, or that Einstein didn't use it much?  Probably not. Other equations--like m=E/c² and E₀=m--were used in lecture and in other papers. It is simply curious to me why the equation has such a misty history given its supra-iconic status. 

• I'm a little hesitant about posting this on the equation because it seems that the answer is obvious, which makes my question seem a little kooky--so far though the answer seems not trivial. 

Notes:

The first appearance in print in general of the equation is a much knottier question, with the "usual suspects" of possibilities exhausted without a satisfactory answer.  I must commend Eric Sacharow (an independent scholar in Milford, Connecticut) for instantaneously suggesting several possibilities during a phone call, all of which were very good and very close to the mark, but not quite there--thus far the best of the possibilities offered.

Here's an early appearance of E=mc², in Revue Scientifique (Rose), 1929, in a review of physics for the previous weeks, a condensed review, signed only "S.V.":

And in this note from the New York Times (1950, sorry no further data yet) reporting on a "garbled" notation of E=mc² that sounds as though it was engraved on a church bell as E=mr² itself garbles the equation as "E-mc²":

                                

A New-to-Me Find: the History of Nobel Prize Nominations

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Yesterday I found a fine resource that lives within another fine resource—somehow I missed it, entirely, and for years I suspect of using the one without noticing the other.

The new-to-me find is the history of nomination process for the Nobel Prize on the Nobel Prize site. What this searchable database holds are all those nominated for the prize in all of the Academy's fields, who nominated whom, what year, and for what area, with biographical links for all involved, an then cross-referenced so you can search by year and name.

• Nobel Prize Nomination Archive:  https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/redirector/?redir=archive
• Nobel Prize site: https://www.nobelprize.org/

I came upon the site looking to see the proof of nomination of Gustave Le Bon for the Physics Award in 1903--and indeed, he was there.  I'm not very sure about what Le Bon had done to achieve this level of recognition as he seems in his polymathic way to be around the peripheries of a lot of interesting things in a number of different fields without being at the core (?)--but there he was. One nomination for that year and then for all time. He didn't stand a chance for the prize for that year, with Becquerel and Poincare receiving it for 1903.

I didn't check to see how many others received one and only one nomination, though I did find who received the most nominations and never receive the award--that distinction belongs to the great Arnold Sommerfeld, who was one of the last of those people who "knew everything", and who over the years received 184 nominations. (#2 by the way was microbiologist Gaston Ramon with 155.)

Just for the fun of it I looked up Richard Feynman and found that he was nominated 48 times, receiving multiple votes in 1956, 1957, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1954, and finally 1965 when we was awarded the prize. Einstein received 62 nominations between 1922 and 1922, receiving them in every year but 1911 and 1915--he was finally awarded the prize (for 1921) in 1922. 

The story of Einstein's Nobel (that, is, the getting-it and not-getting-it part) is a bit complex, but is fabulously told by Abraham Pais in his paper “How Einstein Got the Nobel Prize: Why did the Nobel Committee for Physics wait so long before giving Einstein the Prize, and why did they not award it for relativity?” found in  American Scientist, Vol. 70, No. 4 (July-August 1982), pp. 358-365 (and also in a section of his book Einstein Lived Here).  Suffice to say here that the seemingly very long time for him not to receive the award (that he ultimately was given in 1922 for the photoelectric effect and not for relativity) is a "story which has neither heroes nor culprits" according to Pais, but rather seems one where the delayed recognition was due to very conservative appreciation for the proofs of the work. 

Here's a table from the Pais paper outlining the history of the Einstein nominations:

Again, Pais points out that the Academy warded Einstein the prize for the photoelectric effect, and not for relativity. We can see in the graph below from the Lecat bibliography of relativity (published 1925) that there was an enormous increase in publications on the theory beginning at the end of WWI. Then came the experimental verification in 1919 that made Einstein into Einstein. Of course this is just a quantitative display of the numbers of papers published on the subject for that year--the members of the Academy certainly had some reservation on the theory of relativity even into 1920, citing what Pais refers to as not-unreasonable hesitations on the interpretation of the eclipse data. 

 

In any event, it was a very interesting and somewhat shocking experience to find the nomination archive. I recommend a tour. 

Quiet, the Quietists, and Not Finding a Missing "Principia Mathematica" (1687)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2747

Grazing through old scholarly journals is never a completed task—the more you have to bring to the adventure, the more you will take away from it. This is probably a general truth, though it is particularly so with journals that cut a broad path in the communication of ideas, and this is certainly the story with the late-17^th century journal/magazine, Bibliotheque Universelle. It ran from 1672 to 1726, and the intellectually-thirsty editors ran a kind of review/abstract service for their readers—they found (mostly) newly published books in a wide variety of areas, and wrote summaries and statements on them, with background history, and the occasional editorial comment. Some of the articles were on significant works by John Locke and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, but many and probably most were on obscure topics in nitty theological history and mostly-invisible philosophical issues, or at at least that is how the latter seems to me today. The Bibliotheque brought new ideas to the continent, and brought them in the Lingua Franca, which also happened to be French.

This is the background as I thumbed my way through volume seven, one of several volumes for this year, finding few things that fired any nodule of memory or investigation in my head. 1687 is a big year in the history of science, seeing the publication in July of that year of what may one of them most important books ever published, Isaac Newton's Pricnipa Mathematica.

And then, suddenly, it was there. I knew from a previous experience that an interesting and uncommon review of the Principia by John Locke (of all people) in the next volume (8), which was the third statement on the book outside of Britain. But I hadn't know about this appearance, which would have been published just a couple of months after the Principia appeared.

There were just a few lines announcing the book in the table of contents, but no page reference. I consulted an online version of the journal and did a search on Newton, with no results. That of course made me go through the book—twice--page by page to make sure that the article wasn't there. It wasn't. I imagine that the mention of one of the world's greatest books was, well, a mistake.

The Principia was quiet.

The funny thing was that there was another article on exactly that—quiet. And this was a dangerous quiet, at least for the originator of the theological movement, who would be cast into the flames of the Inquisition and die in prison for the temerity of quietude.

In the next page of the table there was this fine find: “Le Quietiste, ou les Illusions de l'oration de Quietude”, (p 550-554) and “Receuil de diverse pieces concernant le quietisme et les quietistes”(pp 554-559).

These two articles are statements/reviews of two books addressing the Quietism and Quiesiste movement as embodied by its founder, Miguel de Molino (1626-1696). Very long story short, Molino was seen as a threat to the pope and to the Jesuits, preaching a Christianity that seems quite personal and benevolent from where I sit, but at the time was seen as heretical, and for which Molino would be tried by the Holy Offices and condemned to life in prison, and as a matter of fact, Molino died in the (outwardly) beautiful Castel St. Angelo serving out his sentence.

It seems to have a bit forward and backwards for Molino. Charges were brought against him chiefly through the work of pieces like the first presented above, by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1697), whose first efforts were unsuccessful in dislodging Molino, with his own work finding its way to the Index. However, by 1685 he was again sent to the Inquisition, and just months before this book was published, he was already tried and imprisoned.

William James (in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) found Molino to be a “spiritual genius” (p. 130) and his Quietism to be a ”transcendental idealism”, with “a healthy-minded opinion of repentance” (p. 130). He seems to have found nothing threatening in the man, and his imprisonment an “abomination”. The issues were longer and deeper than this, with 250+ points brought up before the Inquisition, including “moral deformity”), but on the whole Quietisme seems as destructive as George Fox's Quakerism, which seems to have shared many spiritual practices with Quietism.

So it seems that the established order in Rome found the message of the Quietists too loud, and the voice of the Principia was to be found in the next volume.

A Beautiful Diagram of Cyclone Activity (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2750

This lovely and significant piece of sci-art appeared in Jacob Bjerknes and H. Solberg's  "Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation"¹ in 1922. This was an expansion of an earlier paper of 1919², and provided the basis for the motion of the atmosphere in terms of warm and cold fronts. “Although rapid transitions or discontinuities in temperature, pressure, and wind velocity had been noted in Jacob’s first model—and even by nineteenth century meteorologists—and although such discontinuities had been theoretically postulated, the 1919 Bergen cyclone model represented the introduction of discontinuities into meteorology as the major focus for practice and, eventually, theory. These “fronts,” as they later were termed, were endowed with scientific reality through the introduction of major changes in forecasting practice. The cyclone model based on fronts entailed the ability to specify in time and three-dimensional space important weather phenomena associated with cyclones to a much greater degree than earlier models could achieve. During the next few years the Bergen group of Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes, Ernst Calwagen, Halvor Solberg, and Tor Bergeron, among others, expanded this preliminary cyclone model and accompanying forecasting methods to a comprehensive system for explaining midlatitude weather changes. The polar front, the occlusion process, an evolving cyclone model, and air mass analysis were the conceptual foundation for a new era in meteorology.”³

 

The two authors “...pictured the polar front as a string of families of cyclones, described by dashed lines linking successive warm and cold front”.--Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather, pg 64, with several reproductions of some of the lovely diagrams.

Notes:

1. J. Bjerknes and H. Solberg, Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation. Offprint/separate, Geofysiske Publikationer 3, no. 1, 1922. 12x9, 18pp (paginated 1-18). Bound in cloth, with a half-title and title, though no publication data save for a running abbreviation of the journal name and volume above the text. Nicely bound in buckram. Provenance: U.S. Navy, Naval War College. “Polar front theory is attributed to Jacob Bjerknes, derived from a coastal network of observation sites in Norway during World War I. ... The convergence line ahead of the low became known as either the steering line or the warm front. The trailing convergence zone was referred to as the squall line or cold front.”--Wiki
2. This was evidently a longer and more thorough version of a paper submitted by Bjernkes and Solberg to the Monthly Weather Review in 1919 on the findings of the Bergen group. --Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology, p. 180; also noting that this article is “frequently cited”.
3. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
4. Wikipedia entry for Bjerknes. 

“Bjerknes was part of a group of meteorologists led by his father, Vilhelm Bjerknes, at the University of Leipzig. (“Bjerknes's father, Vilhelm. has often been called the father of modern meteorology. This title is doubly appropriate, for not only did Vilhelm’s vision and research programs lead to establishing new directions, methods, and the conceptual foundation for the science, but Vilhelm’s son also played a fundamental role in creating this new era in atmospheric science.”) Together they developed the model that explains the generation, intensification and ultimate decay (the life cycle) of mid-latitude cyclones, introducing the idea of fronts, that is, sharply defined boundaries between air masses. This concept is known as the Norwegian cyclone model.”--Wikipedia

“The "Bergen School of Meteorology" is a school of thought which is the basis for much of modern weather forecasting. Founded by the meteorologist Prof. Vilhelm Bjerknes and his younger colleagues in 1917, the Bergen School attempts to define the motion of the atmosphere by means of the mathematics of interactions between hydro- and thermodynamics, some of which had originally been discovered or explained by Bjerknes himself, thus making mathematical predictions regarding the weather possible by systematic data analysis. Much of the work was done at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.”--Wikipedia  It should be noted that Jacob was the chief forecaster and head at Bergen 1918-1931.--Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography

A Very Large and Very Early X-Ray Photo, February 1896

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I made an unexpected find today, poking around in a February 1896¹ volume of the probing, somewhat classically-radical and Easternist journal, The Open Court, a Weekly Journal Devoted to the Religion of Science.  The photo and article form a very early appearance in the U.S. of the weeks-old Roentgen discovery of the x-ray. The first journal edition in English appears to be 23 January 1896 in Nature (vol 53), and the first in a U.S. journal in Science on 31 January, though that is not illustrated.  (The Science article, written by Hugo Muinsterberg of Harvard, notes that this was a good thing for the reassurance of German stature in physics as they had in the last year lost Kundt, Hertz, and von Helmholtz, and now they had Wilhelm Roentgenfor a new placeholder of living greatness.) 

 

 

A close-up of the 12" tall image

The illustrated article by McCormack, in the Taoist-historico-scientific journal Open Court, shares an example of x-ray photography by H(ermann). Schubert (1848-1911, and who would have his paper on the Rontgen rays translated for the Monist in April) ) of the Physical Laboratory in Hamburg which is very large, more than 12" tall, and by far the largest of these famous photos that I have seen. There is a short discussion on what exactly to call the "photograph", since it really wasn't a photo by general standards, and the term "x-ed" is suggested...I'm not sure when the "X-Ray" as a term for the product of being exposed to x-rays and photographic film was, but it wasn't long after this.)  There is a bit of history of the discovery of the x-ray, and a discussion on the idea of chance and discovery in scientific progress. 

There would be an enormous wave of publications on the x-ray over the course of the next year--in fact, the Bibliography of X-ray Literature and Research (1896-1897) by Charles Phillips (published in 1906) is 68pp long and finds more than 1500 books and articles published over just two years. Oddly, the Open Court papers are not to be found in the Phillips bibliography, and I'm not sure why.  

It seems to me that Open Court publishes on the of the first photographs of an x-ray in a U.S. journal. 

McCormack (1865-1932) had an interesting career, translating Lagrange, Weismann, Mach, as well as the photographer and mathematician  Hermann Schubert's books on recreational mathematics), and wrote several books in disparate disciplines.  

Notes:

1. Thomas J. McCormack, "The New X-Rays in Photography", in a bound volume of The Open Court, a Weekly Journal Devoted to the Religion of Science, February 6, 1896, no. 441, volume x-6, pp 4799-4801.  With a very large photographic image (12x9.25" 31x24cm).
Also appearing in this volume, again by McCormack,  "Roentgen's Rays Again", no. 446 vol X-11, March 12, 1896, pp 4483-4844, illustrated with a double-page photographic image. 

First Appearance in Print of the Terms “Relativity Theory” and “Theory of Relativity” 1906

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    Part of the series on "Naming Things"

It was very surprising, finding this, the first time that something so familiar as "relativity theory" appeared in its most familiar form. It appears very soon after the publication of the Einstein 1905 paper, a work by Max Planck¹ that appeared in the Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1906:

Prior to using the words “postulate” and “principle” associated with relativity (as in "Prinzip der Relativitat”, appearing in the second paragraph of Einstein's June 1905 “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” in Annalen der Physik)  it is first referred to as “relativity theory” (“Relativtheorie”) by Max Planck on p. 756 (col 2 line 9 and also on pp 758+759) of this volume. Then in the “discussion” part of the Planck paper the“theory of relativity” (“Einsteinische Relativitatstheorie”) appears for the first time in print just a few pages later (p. 760 col 2 line 15) by Alfred Bucherer.

And there it is.

Notes:

1. Max Planck, "Die Kaufmannschen Messungen der Ablenkbarkeit der β-Strahlen in ihrer Bedeutung für die Dynamik der Elektronen" [The Measurements of Kaufmann on the Deflectability of β-Rays in their Importance for the Dynamics of the Electrons],Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1906, volume VII, the paper occupying pp 753-761 (printed in double columns), printed in Leipzig by S. Hirzel. There are other papers of relativity in VII including Wacker (p 300), Farkas (p 654), Stark (p 353), and Wilkens (p. 846).

• “The term "theory of relativity" was based on the expression "relative theory" (German: Relativtheorie) used in 1906 by Planck, who emphasized how the theory uses the principle of relativity. In the discussion section of the same paper, Alfred Bucherer used for the first time the expression "theory of relativity" (German: Relativitätstheorie).”--Wikipedia

Prior to using the words “postulate” and “principle” associated with relativity (as in "Prinzip der Relativitat”, appearing in the second paragraph of Einstein's June 1905 “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” in Annalen der Physik)  it is first referred to as “relativity theory” (“Relativtheorie”) by Max Planck on p. 756 (col 2 line 9 and also on pp 758+759) of this volume. Then in the “discussion” part of the Planck paper the“theory of relativity” (“Einsteinische Relativitatstheorie”) appears for the first time in print just a few pages later (p. 760 col 2 line 15) by Alfred Bucherer.

And there it is.

Notes:

1. Max Planck, "Die Kaufmannschen Messungen der Ablenkbarkeit der β-Strahlen in ihrer Bedeutung für die Dynamik der Elektronen" [The Measurements of Kaufmann on the Deflectability of β-Rays in their Importance for the Dynamics of the Electrons],Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1906, volume VII, the paper occupying pp 753-761 (printed in double columns), printed in Leipzig by S. Hirzel. There are other papers of relativity in VII including Wacker (p 300), Farkas (p 654), Stark (p 353), and Wilkens (p. 846).

• “The term "theory of relativity" was based on the expression "relative theory" (German: Relativtheorie) used in 1906 by Planck, who emphasized how the theory uses the principle of relativity. In the discussion section of the same paper, Alfred Bucherer used for the first time the expression "theory of relativity" (German: Relativitätstheorie).”--Wikipedia

Found-Art in Scientific Journals--an Acoustic Kraken (1881)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This does for a moment look like a piece of Found Scientific Art--and I guess it is--reminding me of a multiply-layered steely jaw of some creature, which you can see if you look hard enough. In reality, it was the tonal guts of a wonderful scientific apparatus constructed by Rudolph Koenig, reported in the July 14, 1881 issue of Nature:

And the full version of the original 3x3" image

“Prior to the advent of oscilloscopes and other electronic sound-analysis tools, even seemingly rudimentary tasks of acoustic analysis – determining the frequency of a musical tone, for instance, or making waveforms observable – were not simple jobs  with obvious solutions. It fell to researchers of the time to come up with mechanical devices, often quite clever and sometimes rather complex, to make these investigations possible.” “Though oriented differently [the wave siren]... is similar to the other wave siren shown in this collection, but with more complex wave forms in the undulating rims...”--Bart Hopkin, Instrument Maker, “Engravings of early Acoustical Apparatus”, from his website

Rudolph Konig (1832-1901) “far and away the most accomplished among makers of [acoustical devices]” (Hopkin, above) was a very highly accomplished and discriminating instrumentalist, scientific instrument maker, and experimentalist. “Koenig will also be remembered as the inventor and constructor of many other beautiful pieces of apparatus for the investigation of acoustical problems, among which may be mentioned his wave-sirens, the first of which was shown at Philadelphia in 1876. His original work dealt, among other things, with Wheatstone's sound-figures, the characteristic notes of the different vowels, a manometric flame apparatus, a vibration microscope, among others; but perhaps the most important of his researches are those devoted to the phenomena produced by the interference of two tones, in which he disputed the views of Helmholtz as to the existence of summation and difference tones.”--Wikipedia

“Prior to the advent of oscilloscopes and other electronic sound-analysis tools, even seemingly rudimentary tasks of acoustic analysis – determining the frequency of a musical tone, for instance, or making waveforms observable – were not simple jobs  with obvious solutions. It fell to researchers of the time to come up with mechanical devices, often quite clever and sometimes rather complex, to make these investigations possible.” “Though oriented differently [the wave siren]... is similar to the other wave siren shown in this collection, but with more complex wave forms in the undulating rims...”--Bart Hopkin, Instrument Maker, “Engravings of early Acoustical Apparatus”, from his website

 

Finding Einstein 'Neath the Liver Pills (1920)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

If you were sitting in a cafe on a  cold winter morning in Guthrie, Oklahoma, on January 13, 1920, and opened to page two of the town paper, The Leader, and worked your way down the page, past the ads for KiMoids heartburn pills,  Jiff-Jell gelatin desserts, eczema cream, dress patterns, liver pills, adventures to sunny California, and Mr. Louis Bennison starring in a play called "High Pockets", you'd find a picture of Albert Einstein.  Snugly nestled amidst this visual candy is a short report on one of the great experimental results of the 20th century, the verification of the general theory of relativity. Results of the observations made during the May 29 eclipse and then reported to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society on November 6, 1919, confirming the theory was an enormous occasion. Einstein of course expected it; had the results not obtained, he quipped then that The Creator would have some explaining to do. But everything turned out just fine.  J.J. Thomson (as president of the Royal Society)  closed the great meeting and and remarked that  "This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day, and it is fitting that it should be announced at a meeting of the society so closely connected with him. . . . The result [is] one of the highest achievements of human thought." Thomson was not given over to being hyperbolic, and if anything was just stating the case as it was.

The event was carried loudly by leading newspapers all in about a week or so after the event, the effect of which established the beginning of Einstein being about the most famous man in the world.  Two months earlier he more than likely would have been an unknown except to a very small percentage of a reading population. And so here he is, in  almost the center of Oklahoma, and then almost in the center of the U.S., in a tiny report--but the report had a photograph, and the story was at least on page two, making him a known-something in about the middle of the middle.  

Detail of page two, from the Library of Congress' fantastic Chronicles of America (digitized) newspaper collections:

• The Guthrie daily leader. (Guthrie, Okla.), 13 Jan. 1920. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

A Tiny Notice Foreshadowing a Great Announcement--Experimental Proof of the General Theory of Relativity, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2736

According to Abraham Pais, an "excited" Albert Einstein contributed a very short note ("Zuschriften an die Herausgeber, Prufung der allgemeinen relativitatstheorie"/"A Test of the General Theory of Relativity") to the editors of the journal Die Naturwissenschaften¹ reporting on the telegram he had received from H.A. Lorentz on September 22 on the impending confirmation of the theory of relativity as it was tested in the May 29, 1919 eclipse experiments organized by Sir Frank Dyson. Chandrasekhar explains the situation so: 

• "It was some months before the two expeditions returned to England and the participants were able to measure their plates and collate their results. But rumours of the successful confirmation of Einstein's prediction reached Einstein in early September I919. And on 22 September I919, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz sent Einstein a telegram confirming the rumours to which Einstein replied (also by telegram).. Einstein's own satisfaction with the outcome of the British expeditions is shown by the postcard (dated September 27, 1919) to his ailing mother in Switzerland. It said: Dear Mother: Good news today. H. A. Lorentz has wired me that the British expeditions have actually proved the light deflection near the Sun...."

"The telegram that had announced the news to Einstein...was an informal communication. Nothing was definitive. Yet Einstein sent almost at once a very brief note to Naturwissenschaften for the sole purpose of reporting the telegram he had received. He was excited." (Pais, Subtle is the Lord, p 303).

Einstein's note in Naturwissenschaften was concise and to the point: "...the English expedition, under Eddington...has observed the deflection of light at the limb of the sun demanded by the General Theory of Relativity³..."

The results of the experiment were read on November 6, 1919 (the presentation begun by Dyson, followed by A. C. Crommelin, the leader of the Sobral expedition)  to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, and famously published in the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society in 1920 as “A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919”⁴.  J.J. Thomson (as president of the Royal Society)  closed the meeting and “pronounced the canonization [of Einstein]”: 'This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day, and it is fitting that it should be announced at a meeting of the society so closely connected with him. . . . The result [is] one of the highest achievements of human thought.' (Pais, Subtle..., in the chapter “The Suddenly Famous Doctor Einstein”, p 305) R.H. Folwer, president of the Royal Astronomical, also spoke and announced '“The conclusion is so important that no effort should be spared in seeking confirmation in other ways.”

The Einstein note is dated October 9 in the text and was published a week later on October 17. It is one of the first appearances on the confirmation of the theory, with the exception, evidently, of a few notices in Berlin newspapers⁵ just days earlier. (Again, this according to Pais.) It would be on November 6 that "Lorentz sent another telegram to Einstein, confirming the news. On November 7, 1919, the Einstein legend began." I assume that Pais is talking about the general article that appeared in the London Times on that day (and which would be written for the New York Times on the 9th, and then it was off to the races with the news, with Einstein himself contributing an article three weeks later to The Times). Well, except in Germany, where the reporting beyond this notice in Naturwissenschaften was more reserved, as noted by an article on the 1919 eclipse on the Max Planck Gesellschaft website: "In contrast to the enthusiastic reception shown by the foreign press, the media in Germany were more reticent on the subject. Not until 14 December 1919 did the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung publish a photo of Einstein and an article entitled: “A new luminary for the history of the world: Albert Einstein, whose research means a total revolution in the way we see the world and whose findings are equal to those of a Copernicus, Kepler and Newton”. 

Here's the entire announcement from Naturwissenschaften:

Writing about the eclipse on his website, Simon Singh says that J.P. McEvoy, author of Eclipse: The Science and History of Nature’s Most Spectacular Phenomenon (Fourth Estate Ltd., 1999), "encapsulated the significance of the announcement" writing of the ironies of the event:  "A new theory of the universe, the brain-child of a German Jew working in Berlin, had been confirmed by an English Quaker on a small African island." A further bit to add here is that the expeditions were undertaken by British scientists to prove the work of a German scientist, beginning their work before the end of WWI.

S. Chandrasekar reports that in 1933 Rutherford expounded on the eclipse and Einstein's fame, rather more broadly and more deeply:

"The war had just ended: and the complacency of the Victorian and the
Edwardian times had been shattered. The people felt that all their values and
all their ideals had lost their bearings. Now, suddenly, they learnt that an
astronomical prediction by a German scientist had been confirmed by
expeditions to Brazil and West Africa and, indeed, prepared for already
during the war, by British astronomers. Astronomy had always appealed to
public imagination; and an astronomical discovery, transcending worldly
strife, struck a responsive cord. The meeting of the Royal Society, at which
the results of the British expeditions were reported, was headlined in all the
British papers; and the typhoon of publicity crossed the Atlantic. From that
point on, the American press played Einstein to the maximum..."⁶

I guess this is where the ultra-fame of Einstein begins.

Notes:

1.  Die Naturwissenschaften, volume 7, heft 42, October 17, 1919. p 776

2. S. Chandrasekhar, “Verifying the Theory of Relativity”, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jan., 1976), pp. 249-260.

3.  The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 7 (English).

4. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, C. R. Davidson, “A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Solar eclipse of May 29, 1919”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,  A 220 (571-581): 291–333 (1920). Eddington had written previously on the expedition, "The total eclipse of 1919 May 29 and the influence of gravitation on light”, in The Observatory, Vol. 42, p. 119-122 (1919)

5. "An article by Alexander Moszkopwski entitled 'Die Sonne bracht es an den Tag' in the Berliner Tageblatt of October 8, 1919, must presumably have been based in information from Einstein himself". (Pais, Subtle..., footnote p 306.) Also, Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin contributed  “The Eclipse Expedition to Sobral”  in The Observatory 42, 368-371, and though it published in October there is no mention of definitive results yet.  Crommelin also publishes an article in Nature on 13 November (volume 104, p. 280-1), appearing about a week after the Royal Society meeting, in which he publishes the results, all on the equivalent of a single page.  

6.  Chandrasekhar, ibid., pg 251.

 [Interesting to note here that in Maurice Lecat's Bibliographie de la Relativite (1924) this contribution receives only a scant placement within the Einstein section, in part 13 (c).]

And just for fun, here's a good graphic drawn by the old hand W.Robinson for the Illustrated London News, for general consumption, based on information provided the magazine by Crommelin, and published November 22, 1919, page 820:

 [Image source: University of Chicago, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/doi/full/10.1086/376099, and this via the excellent article by Matthew Stanley, “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War” The 1919 Eclipse and Eddington as Quaker Adventurer", In Isis, 94/1, March 2003.