JF Ptak Science Books

Turner's Bibliographic Review of Nuclear Fission 1934-1940

Louis Turner’s Review of Published Work on Nuclear Fission, 1934-1940.

With a List of Turner's References (Below)

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I've found this article¹ by physicist Louis A. Turner to be very helpful over the years. He was an I-was-there guy (and actually an I-am-here guy) who wrote a stuccato article on the history of nuclear fission which was top heavy in references, and did so in 1940, just before the clamp came down on publication on the topic. Certainly there are other more modern efforts in this area that are far more detailed, but few have managed to do so good a job in as limited space as Turner, which the fabulous John A. Wheeler recognized as a "great and timely" review².

Notes:

1. Louis Turner. "Nuclear Fission." Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1940. An article in the Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 12/1, January 1940, pp 1-30 of an issue of 85pp Original orange wrappers. Fine condition. Also contains articles by Seaborg and Zwicky.

2. J.A. Wheeler, "Fission in 1939, the Puzzle and the Promise " Annual Reviews, 1989.

 

His 133 references can be read as a succession of one-line histories of the subject (barring the permissions to reproduce the entire article):

1. E. Fermi, Nature 133, 898 1934.

2. E. Amaldi, O. D'Agostino, F. Rassetti and E. Segrè, Proc. Roy. Soc. A146, 483 1934.

3. I. Noddack, Zeits. f. angew. Chimie. 37, 653 1934.

4. O. D'Agostino and E. Segrè, Gaz. Chim. Ital. 65, 1088 1935.

5. I. Curie, H. von Halban and P. Preiswerk, J. de phys. [7] 6, 361 1935; C.R. 200, 1841 1935; 200, 2079 1935.

 

Quantum Mechanics and Physics Timelines

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[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.

 

Bibliography of George Boole

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This bibliography for George Boole just came in very handy, so I decided to distribute it. It appears in  Treatise on Differential Equations, printed in 1865 and edited by Isaac Todhunter, the full text of which is found here.  A very good entry on Boole is found in the Encyclopedia Britannica 11th, here.

Spacetime Singularities and Gravitational Collapse: Skeleton Lists of Major Publications

Here are two useful sets of biblographic references to publication on black holes.  Mostly it is cobbled together, except for part two (the chronological part) which is taken from the University of London, Queen Mary College, School of Mathematical Sciences site and streamlined a bit for quick reference. 

(1) Spacetime Singularities and Gravitational Collapse

(Alphabetical)

H. Bateman, The transformation of coordinates which can be used to transform one physical problem into another, Proc. London Math. Soc. 8 (1910), 469-488.

E. Cartan, Sur les espaces conformes généralisés et l'Univers optique, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 174 (1922), 857-859.

E. Cartan, Sur les variétés à connexion affine et la théorie de la relativité généralisée I; I (suite); II, Ann. Sci. École Norm. Sup. 40 (1923), 325-412; 41 (1924), 1-25; 42 (1925), 17-88.
1983. 

Isaac Newton Online

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[Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton]

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"

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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

Timeline of the Discovery of the Elements

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Timeline of the Discovery of the Elements

I found this very useful timeline presented in a not very friendly way at the about.com site. I couldn't help but to coyp it and clean it up a little to make it a little more accessible.  Caveat: none of this is my own work--all of the credit for putting this list together goes to Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.   The original site for the list is About.com. 

"Here's a helpful table chronicling the discovery of the elements. The date is listed for when the element was first isolated. In many cases, the presence of a new element was suspected years or even thousands of years before it could be purified. Click on an element's name to see its entry in the Periodic Table and get facts for the element."

Timeline of the Big Bang

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Here's an interesting, short timeline that I found and and which I reprint below--it was part of the appendix to the book by J.-P. Luminet,  L'Invention du Big Bang (Editions du Seuil, Paris), which was printed in 1997.  "Ce texte est l'introduction de l'ouvrage A. Friedmann, G. Lemaître : Essais de Cosmologie , traduction et notes de J.-P. Luminet et A. Grib, Le Seuil, collections 'Sources du Savoir' ". 

The U.S. Civil War--Handy Alphabetical List of Battles

Since we're nearing the half-way point of the 150th anniversary of the war I thought to put together a handy list of battles--I think I've seen one elsewhere but really I cannot recall the locatiion, so I cobbled together a fast-and-simple alpha list to have on hand. 

Alphabetical Listing of Major Civil War Campaigns, by Battle

Allatoona Georgia October 5, 1864
Amelia Springs Virginia April 5, 1865
Antietam / Sharpsburg Maryland September 16-18, 1862
Appomattox Station Virginia April 8, 1865
Appomattox Court House Virginia April 9, 1865
Aquia Creek Virginia May 29-June 1, 1861
Arkansas Post / Fort Hindman Arkansas January 9-11, 1863
Atlanta Georgia July 22, 1864
Athens Alabama January 26, 1864
Averasborough / Smiths Ferry / Black River North Carolina March 16, 1865
Auburn / Catlett's Station / St. Stephen's Church Virginia October 13, 1863
Auburn / Coffee Hill Virginia October 14, 1863

Some Important Dates in the History of French Mathematics

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This interesting, unusual, and scarce publication was printed for the New York World's Fair, 1939, as part of the French pavilion.  It is only seven pages long, but its a useful seven pages, and very seldom seen. 

Milestone Papers in the Physical Review Letters, 1958-1969

Physical Review Letters Milestones  1958-1969

Data re-ordered and summarized from much lengthier, reviewed and abstracted summaries from:
Letters from the Past - A PRL Retrospective
Gene D. Sprouse
Editor-in-Chief, APS

1969    High-Energy Inelastic e-p Scattering at 6° and 10°
E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, G. Miller, L. W. Mo, R. E. Taylor, M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, G. C. Hartmann, and H. W. Kendall
Phys. Rev. Lett. 23, 930 (1969)  NOBEL 1990 

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