Amateurs and the Rise of Astrophysics 1840–1910

This essay examines the role of amateurs in founding the astronomical subdiscipline of astrophysics. During 1840–1870, they initiated many of the observing programs that came to comprise the new specialty. And during 1870–1910, they participated both in the ongoing research of the field and the campaign to provide it with an institutional base. These general trends are illustrated by examples from the lives of ten prominent amateur solar physicists.     

Unterscheidung und Synthese: Rezeptionsformen akustischer Forschung in der Musikliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts

Differentiation and synthesis. Forms of reception of acoustical research in the musical literature of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, both musical scholars and natural scientists discussed the relevance of acoustical research for the theory and practice of music. Whereas some musical theorists and acousticians plead together for an acoustical foundation of musical theory, other scholars questioned the significance of physical and physiological knowledge for a deeper understanding of music. Based on an analysis of musical journals, popular scientific writings, theoretical treatises and musical dictionaries this article demonstrates how musical scholars and natural scientists argued about the question which discipline should have the final say about musical concepts and terminologies. To merge both heterogeneous spheres – music and acoustics – or to carefully distinguish between them – these two positions shaped the dispute over the relationship between music and natural sciences in the nineteenth century.     

两唐书《天文志》日食记录初探

唐代的日食记录,通常包括朔日干支、日食宿度、食分及起讫时刻等信息,总体以《新唐书.天文志》的记载较为准确和完整,但脱漏失载的情况仍然存在。《志》文中有关日食的模糊预言,暴露了帝王政治的统治危机,较为含蓄地反映了当时的政治事件和社会问题。但不可否认,《旧唐书.天文志》仍有《新志》无法替代的史料价值。     

日本的产业技术扶持政策与实施手段 以太阳能产业为例

日本经济的核心是日本企业以持续技术革新为基础的国际竞争力。日本企业之所以能持续进行技术革新是与日本政府的政策引导和支持分不开的。本文指出日本政府在国家总体目标之下,利用自身的信息优势和资源优势,根据时代的变迁,制定不同的产业技术政策,通过政策引导,使企业能够明确技术革新的方向,并通过对市场的增进为新技术提供需求,从而促进新兴产业的发展。     

高中物理新课程三维目标的教学思考

三维目标是相互联系、相互渗透的整体,是一个完整的人在物理学习探究活动中实现物理素养建构的三个侧面。因此,课堂教学应该全面关注三维目标,并将它整合于统一的物理教学活动过程之中。     

On reductionism and emergence in geomorphology

Much geomorphological enquiry has been devoted to the understanding of landscapes via the construction of models based on the relationships between process and form. This paper examines the philosophical, theoretical and practical problems involved in bridging the gap between studies of geomorphological processes and explanations of landscape development. It argues that process geomorphology is essentially reductionist and discusses the practical and logical limitations of such an approach to science. It suggests that landscapes are emergent phenomena and, by drawing from the philosophical and practical lessons derived from the physics of non-linear systems, demonstrates that they are not amenable to reductionist explanations.     

“Lachkabinett” und “großes Fest” der Physiker. Walter Grotrians “physikalischer Einakter” zu Max Plancks 80. Geburtstag

“Funhouse” and “Big Celebration” of the Physicists. Walter Grotrian's ?Physical One‐Act Play”? for Max Planck's 80th Birthday. On the occasion of Max Planck's 80th birthday on April 23, 1938, a “big celebration of the physicists” (großes Fest der Physiker) was celebrated at the Harnack‐House in Berlin. The festivities were organized by the German Physical Society. Part of the ceremony was a “Physical One‐act‐play” (Physikalischer Einakter) written by the Potsdam astrophysicist Walter Grotrian. The actors of the humorous play were chief protagonists in the development of quantum theory such as Debye, Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. In this essay we analyze Grotrian's drama against the background of both the festive event and the professional and social setting of the physicists. We argue that below the level of comedy a number of characteristic and normally unexpressed aspects of the epistemic culture of the German physics by the end of the nineteen‐thirties is treated in the play.     

Schooling the Quantum Generations: Textbooks and Quantum Cultures from the 1910s to the 1930s

Ever since Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), textbooks have suffered a bad reputation. They have been accused of distorting—at times purportedly—history and of feeding students with an unacceptably simplified and optimistic view of science. This attitude started to change only in recent times. With the increase of attention paid not only to how theories are conceived, but also how they are practiced, disseminated, and appropriated, historians have rehabilitated textbooks as a legitimate site of knowledge production. In this paper, I adopt textbooks as an instrument to unfold multiple facets of the culture that allowed quantum physics to flourish between 1900 and the early 1930s. I organize the article around two stories about two major textbooks, i.e., Sommerfeld′s Atombau und Spektrallinien and Dirac′s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. I explore the complex pedagogical cultures underlying these two masterpieces and how they intersect local agendas.     

Quantum Cultures during the Prehistory of Quantum Gravity: Léon Rosenfeld's Early Contributions to Quantum Gravity

In this paper we consider the prehistory of quantum gravity (1916–1930) from two perspectives. First, we investigate how this research field constituted itself and we propose for the first time a red thread to trace its evolution in this earliest period. Second, we focus on a case study: the earliest work of Léon Rosenfeld. In 1927 he tried to merge wave mechanics with general relativity in the context of a five‐dimensional universe. We describe how Oskar Klein, Louis de Broglie, and Théophile De Donder influenced Rosenfeld's work and analyze how and why Rosenfeld attempted to reconcile Einstein's theory with quantum phenomena. We argue that Rosenfeld investigated for the first time the corrections to a classical space‐time metric generated by a quantum source. As far as we know, Rosenfeld's approach has been largely ignored until today: he himself considered it “an accident.” After having reconsidered its connection with de Broglie's ideas and Rosenfeld's interpretation of the wave function in 1927, we argue that Rosenfeld's work can be interpreted as a first attempt to introduce the pilot‐wave theory in the context of quantum gravity and we infer that this was one of the reasons that ruled it out.