Related papers: Physicists and the 1945 Decision to Drop the Bomb
Heisenberg, Bohr and others were forced to renounce on the description of the objective reality as the aim of physics because of the paradoxical quantum phenomena observed on the atomic level. The contemporary quantum mechanics created on…
The global requirements for energy are increasing rapidly as the global population increases and the under-developed nations become more advanced. The traditional fuels used in their traditional ways will become increasingly unable to meet…
The Introduction in this paper underlines the present general situation for energy and the environment using the words of the US Secretary of Energy. A short presentation is made of some major nuclear power plants used to study one…
Guided by history, we review the major developments concerning realistic nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentials since the pioneering work by Kuo and Brown on the effective nuclear interaction. Our main emphasis is on the physics underlying various…
The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…
Neither the world nor science came to an end when the gunfire stopped on 11 November 1918 (close to 11 AM in some time zone), but neither would ever be the same again. Part I of this inquiry (Observatory 138, 46-58, April 2018) looked at…
Naturally occurring nuclear reactors existed in uranium deposits on Earth long before Enrico Fermi built the first man-made nuclear reactor beneath Staggs Field in 1942. In the story of their discovery, there are important lessons to be…
The year 2025 had been designated by UNESCO as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. 125 years ago Max Planck's discovery of radiation quanta started the quantum era and 100 years ago quantum mechanics was discovered by…
We recall the early theoretical speculations on the possible explosive uses of antimatter, from 1946 to the first production of antiprotons, at Berkeley in 1955, and until the first capture of cold antiprotons, at CERN on July 17-18, 1986,…
Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…
This paper deals with the Physics Institute of via Panisperna in Rome, getting ready for investigation on neutron physics before Fermi's discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity. The importance of nuclear research had been acknowledged in…
The atomic bomb uses fission of heavy elements to produce a large amount of energy. It was designed and deployed during World War II by the United States military. The first test of an atomic bomb occurred in July of 1945 in New Mexico and…
Superconductivity is macroscopic quantum phenomenon. From force of habit most physicists pay no heed to a paradoxicality of this fact. Niels Bohr considered quantum mechanics as atomic physics and the paradoxical quantum principles may be…
The discovery of atomic nucleus by E. Rutherford, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the Nuclear Physics original landmark. From then, a series of experiments in which beams of particles composed of neutrons, protons and others,…
The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…
The Italian civil nuclear projects had a very early origin, with the first ideas originating as far back as 1945. The construction of the first three plants dated back to the period 1956-1964, and at that time Italy ranked third in the…
Despite numerous achievements and recent progress, nuclear physics is often (wrongly) considered an old field of research nowadays. However, developments in theoretical frameworks and reliable experimental techniques have made the field…
The history and advances of neutronics calculations at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project through the present is reviewed. We briefly summarize early simpler, and more approximate neutronics methods. We then motivate the need to better…
This report is based on a series of papers written between 1980 and 2005 on the origin of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, which was known to one of the authors in the late 1970s already, as well as to a number of other physicists, who…
The opening of the meson factories twenty years ago provided nuclear physics with new beams, higher momentum transfers, and new opportunities for precision measurements. The resulting changes in nuclear physics were substantial, altering…