The 20th Century has been called the Century of Physics. It could be even more appropriate to call it the Century of Solid State Physics . All the technological developments which had changed the world by the end of the century had been based upon previous scientific developments in Solid State Physics. The Braggs, Debye, Bardeen, Landau were certainly at the forefront of all those revolutionary changes. Contents: The Braggs; Peter Debye; John Bardeen; Lev Davidovich Landau; The Relevance of Materials Science. Readership: Final-year undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, researchers working in materials physics, condensed matter/solid-state physics.
Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle physics. Solid State Insurrection argues that solid state physics was essential to securing the vast social, political, and financial capital Cold War physics enjoyed in the twentieth century. Solid state’s technological bent, and its challenge to the “pure science” ideal many physicists cherished, helped physics as a whole respond more readily to Cold War social, political, and economic pressures. Its research kept physics economically and technologically relevant, sustaining its cultural standing and policy influence long after the sheen of the Manhattan Project had faded. With this book, Joseph D. Martin brings a new perspective to some of the most enduring questions about the role of physics in American history.
Focuses on the field of solid-state physics - also referred to as condensed matter physics - which grew to maturity between 1920 and 1960. The history of some exciting developments is told here in an easy-to-follow text, accessible to general readers, while maintaining standards of high scholarship.
At the end of the nineteenth century, some physicists believed that the basic principles underlying their subject were already known, and that physics in the future would only consist of filling in the details. They could hardly have been more wrong. The past century has seen the rise of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, and solid-state physics, among other fields. These subjects have fundamentally changed our understanding of space, time, and matter. They have also transformed daily life, inspiring a technological revolution that has included the development of radio, television, lasers, nuclear power, and computers. In Quantum Generations, Helge Kragh, one of the world's leading historians of physics, presents a sweeping account of these extraordinary achievements of the past one hundred years. The first comprehensive one-volume history of twentieth-century physics, the book takes us from the discovery of X rays in the mid-1890s to superstring theory in the 1990s. Unlike most previous histories of physics, written either from a scientific perspective or from a social and institutional perspective, Quantum Generations combines both approaches. Kragh writes about pure science with the expertise of a trained physicist, while keeping the content accessible to nonspecialists and paying careful attention to practical uses of science, ranging from compact disks to bombs. As a historian, Kragh skillfully outlines the social and economic contexts that have shaped the field in the twentieth century. He writes, for example, about the impact of the two world wars, the fate of physics under Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the role of military research, the emerging leadership of the United States, and the backlash against science that began in the 1960s. He also shows how the revolutionary discoveries of scientists ranging from Einstein, Planck, and Bohr to Stephen Hawking have been built on the great traditions of earlier centuries. Combining a mastery of detail with a sure sense of the broad contours of historical change, Kragh has written a fitting tribute to the scientists who have played such a decisive role in the making of the modern world.
This volume describes and analyses the highly successful career of the Dutch physicist and Nobel prize winner P.J.W. Debye (1884- 1966) in the Third Reich. The book sketches the life of a man who lived for science, but at the same time maintained close contacts with influential officials, industrialists and sometimes even politicians. In this context Debye declined to respond in public to the treatment of Jews in society in general and in science in particular, even after his migration to the United States in 1940. By combining a biographical perspective with network analysis and research on contemporary moral assessments, this book sheds new and disturbing light on Debyes socio-political worldview and his involvement in the Aryanization of German science.
This undergraduate textbook provides an introduction to the fundamentals of solid state physics, including a description of the key people in the field and the historic context. The book concentrates on the electric and magnetic properties of materials. It is written for students up to the bachelor level in the fields of physics, materials science, and electric engineering. Because of its vivid explanations and its didactic approach, it can also serve as a motivating pre-stage and supporting companion in the study of the established and more detailed textbooks of solid state physics. The textbook is suitable for a quick repetition prior to examinations. This second edition is extended considerably by detailed mathematical treatments in many chapters, as well as extensive coverage of magnetic impurities.
Solid State Physics is a textbook for students of physics, material science, chemistry, and engineering. It is the state-of-the-art presentation of the theoretical foundations and application of the quantum structure of matter and materials. This second edition provides timely coverage of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last decade (especially in low-dimensional systems and quantum transport). It helps build readers' understanding of the newest advances in condensed matter physics with rigorous yet clear mathematics. Examples are an integral part of the text, carefully designed to apply the fundamental principles illustrated in the text to currently active topics of research. Basic concepts and recent advances in the field are explained in tutorial style and organized in an intuitive manner. The book is a basic reference work for students, researchers, and lecturers in any area of solid-state physics. - Features additional material on nanostructures, giving students and lecturers the most significant features of low-dimensional systems, with focus on carbon allotropes - Offers detailed explanation of dissipative and nondissipative transport, and explains the essential aspects in a field, which is commonly overlooked in textbooks - Additional material in the classical and quantum Hall effect offers further aspects on magnetotransport, with particular emphasis on the current profiles - Gives a broad overview of the band structure of solids, as well as presenting the foundations of the electronic band structure. Also features reported with new and revised material, which leads to the latest research
On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe called on his fellow scientists to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. What drove Bethe, the head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to renounce the weaponry he had once worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe’s early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle. As Silvan Schweber follows Bethe from his childhood in Germany, to laboratories in Italy and England, and on to Cornell University, he shows how these differing environments were reflected in the kind of physics Bethe produced. Many of the young quantum physicists in the 1930s, including Bethe, had Jewish roots, and Schweber considers how Liberal Judaism in Germany helps explain their remarkable contributions. A portrait emerges of a man whose strategy for staying on top of a deeply hierarchical field was to tackle only those problems he knew he could solve. Bethe’s emotional maturation was shaped by his father and by two women of Jewish background: his overly possessive mother and his wife, who would later serve as an ethical touchstone during the turbulent years he spent designing nuclear bombs. Situating Bethe in the context of the various communities where he worked, Schweber provides a full picture of prewar developments in physics that changed the modern world, and of a scientist shaped by the unprecedented moral dilemmas those developments in turn created.
As the twentieth century ended, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the physical advances underlying these applications are poorly understood and underappreciated by U.S. citizens. In this overview, Cassidy views physics through America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.
