- Why was the idea that a magnet could affect atomic structure considered strange in 1896?
History of Physics
The people, discoveries, and disputes that shaped physics.
- Why did many contemporaries initially dismiss the Zeeman effect as just an optical anomaly?
- What assumption about the structure of atoms did the Zeeman effect overturn?
- What was the luminiferous ether supposed to explain, and why did physicists believe light needed one?
- What made this the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in history?
- Why is Rutherford's 1917 experiment considered the first deliberately engineered nuclear reaction?
- How many years passed between Rutherford's prediction of the neutron and Chadwick's experimental discovery of it?
- How long did it take for the strong nuclear force implied by this scattering data to be formally theorized?
- Why were atoms still considered 'useful fictions' by some scientists as late as the early 1900s?
- How did Schrödinger's 1925 Christmas holiday in Arosa lead to the most productive stretch of his career?
- How old was Heisenberg when he formulated the uncertainty principle?
- Why did many physicists hope Dirac's prediction of antimatter was wrong?
- What was the 'Pauli effect' that colleagues joked about?
- What made Fermi's colleagues coin his name as a category for a certain kind of physicist?
- What is a Fermi problem, and why did estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago become a teaching tradition?
- What three discoveries did Einstein publish in his 1905 annus mirabilis papers?
- What did I. I. Rabi mean by calling parity violation the most startling result in physics since the neutron?
- What made Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen such an influential hub for young physicists?
- How did Freeman Dyson show that Tomonaga's, Schwinger's, and Feynman's independently developed approaches were equivalent?
- Where did the name 'quark' actually come from?
- Why is it notable that Josephson made his prediction while still a graduate student?
- What made the electroweak theory's calculations produce unusable infinities before 1971?
- What distinguishes a type-II superconductor from the type first discovered in 1911?
- What four papers did Einstein publish between March and September 1905, and what did each establish?
- What personal connections did Bethe have to both Einstein and Oppenheimer?
- What did Galileo observe in 1609 that the International Year of Astronomy was timed to commemorate?
- What discoveries did Galileo publish in the Sidereus Nuncius about Jupiter's moons and the Moon's surface?
- What is Structured Procrastination, and how does it turn avoidance into productivity?
- What did Freeman Dyson's 1949 paper prove about the three competing formulations of quantum electrodynamics?
- Why was Dyson's contribution described as synthesis rather than original discovery?
- What range of subjects did Dyson work on during his decades at the Institute for Advanced Study?
- Why did Dyson never win a Nobel Prize despite his foundational work in physics?
- Why did Higgs spend much of his later career explaining that the field's name was partly an accident of citation convention?