Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics PDF Download

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9814465933
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Alexei Kojevnikov
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814293121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics.

Author: Stephen R. Graubard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135130691X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Twenty-five years ago, Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought introduced a wide audience to his ideas. Holton argued that from ancient times to the modern period, an astonishing feature of innovative scientific work was its ability to hold, simultaneously, deep and opposite commitments of the most fundamental sort. Over the course of Holton's career, he embraced both the humanities and the sciences. Given this background, it is fitting that the explorations assembled in this volume reflect both individually and collectively Holton's dual roots. In the opening essay, Holton sums up his long engagement with Einstein and his thematic commitment to unity. The next two essays address this concern. In historicized form, Lorraine Daston returns the question of the scientific imagination to the Enlightenment period when both sciences and art feared imagination. Daston argues that the split whereby imagination was valued in the arts and loathed in the sciences is a nineteenth-century divide. James Ackerman on Leonardo da Vinci meshes perfectly with Daston's account, showing a form of imaginative intervention where it is irrelevant to draw analogies between art and science. Historians of religion Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner pursue the imagination into the bedroom with literary-theological representations. Science, culture, and the imagination also intersect with biologist Edward Wilson and physicist Steven Weinberg. Both tackle the big question of the unity of knowledge and worldviews from a scientific perspective while art historian Ernst Gombrich does the same from the perspective of art history. To emphasize the nitty-gritty of scientific practice, chemists Bretislav Fredrich and Dudley Herschback provide a remarkable historical tour at the boundary of chemistry and physics. In the concluding essay, historian of education Patricia Albjerg Graham addresses pedagogy head-on. In these various reflections on science, art, literature, philosophy, and education, this volume gives us a view in common: a deep and abiding respect for Gerald Holton's contribution to our understanding of science in culture. Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of physics at Harvard University. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. Everett Mendelsohn is director of the History of Science Program at Harvard University.

Author: Paul Forman
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814293113
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis has become famous as the first argument in favor of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular for its demonstration of the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany — known for its irrationality and antiscientism — and the emerging concept of quantum acausality. At the 2007 international conference in Vancouver, Canada, leading historians of physics discussed the implications of the Forman thesis in the historiography of modern science. Their papers collected in this volume represent a cutting-edge research on the history of quantum revolution.

Author: Forman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Annotation. This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis has become famous as the first argument in favor of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular for its demonstration of the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany known for its irrationality and antiscientism and the emerging concept of quantum acausality. At the 2007 international conference in Vancouver, Canada, leading historians of physics discussed the implications of the Forman thesis in the historiography of modern science. Their papers collected in this volume represent a cutting-edge research on the history of quantum revolution.

Author: Peter Galison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113670972X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Modern science has changed every aspect of life in ways that cannot be compared to developments of previous eras. This four-volume set presents key developments within modern physical science and the effects of these discoveries on modern global life. The first two volumes explore the history of the concept of relativity, the cultural roots of science, the concept of time and gravity before, during, and after Einstein's theory, and the cultural reception of relativity. Volume 3 explores the impact of modern science upon global politics and the creation of a new kind of war, and Volume 4 details the old and new efforts surrounding the elucidation of the quantum world, as well as the cultural impact of particle physics. This reprint collection pools the best scholarship available, collected from a large array of difficult to acquire books, journals, and pamphlets. Each volume begins with an introductory essay, written by one of the top scholars in the history of science. Students and scholars of modern culture, science, and society will find these volumes a veritable research gold mine.

Author: Paul Forman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521436151
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Against Transcendence is the first gathering of Paul Forman's influential essays in the history of modern physics. Written over the last twenty years, and offered here with newly written introductions, Paul Forman's essays are exemplary in connecting the content with the context of modern physics. They explore the scientific life in Germany following World War I and America following World War II, underscoring the bearing of wider cultural factors upon the organisation, direction, interpretation, and success of physical research. The volume includes two seminal essays in the history of physics: Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918 1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment, and Beyond Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1945 1960. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, the essays in Against Transcendence paint a history of modern physics that historians and physicists alike will find fascinating."

Author: Dipankar Home
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387715207
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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This book presents an account of all aspects of Einstein’s achievements in quantum theory, his own views, and the progress his work has stimulated since his death. While some chapters use mathematics at an undergraduate physics level, a path is provided for the reader more concerned with ideas than equations, and the book will benefit to anybody interested in Einstein and his approach to the quantum.

Author: Robert Golub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192555367
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
Following the path by which humanity learned quantum mechanics can lead to an improved teaching and understanding of the fundamental theory and the origins of its perceived limitations. The purpose of this textbook is to retrace the development of quantum mechanics by investigating primary sources (including original published papers and letters) with attention to their timing and influence. Placing the development of quantum mechanics in its historical context, from the nascent philosophical notions of matter, atoms, and void in Ancient Greece, to their scientific realization in the 19th and 20th centuries, the book culminates with an examination of the current state of the field and an introduction to quantum information and computing.

Author: Rachel Fountain Eames
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350299839
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.