Related papers: Physicists and the 1945 Decision to Drop the Bomb
This contribution aims to give an overview of the historical context of neutrino physics. I will present the strong social trends that shaped physics and the way physicists worked, along the 20th century. First, we will see the background…
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…
Nuclear physics experiments are always in need of more and more advanced detection systems. During the last years relevant technological developments have come out with many improvements in terms of performance and compactness of detector…
South America is a region which is free from nuclear weapons. However, this was not an inevitable development from the relationships among its countries. Indeed, regional rivalries between Brazil and Argentina, with military implications…
This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…
Although largely unrecognized, Gerry Brown had played a seminal and prescient role for the development of the currently heralded "first-principles approach" to nuclear dynamics known as "nuclear effective field theory" ($n$EFT for short). I…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
This article examines the changing relationship between the public and nuclear weapons in a context of increasing international insecurity. It discusses the erosion of the nuclear taboo, understood as a normative aversion to nuclear use.…
100 years ago Einstein discovered $E=mc^2$, the secret energy stored in ordinary mass. $\Delta H = D(H-H)$ is the chemical energy released in chemical bond formation between two H atoms. The failure to recognize the enormously different…
The theoretical investigations at ITEP in the years 1945-1958 are reviewed. There are exposed the most important theoretical results, obtained in the following branches of physics: 1) the theory of nuclear reactors on thermal neutrons; 2)…
According to Alisa Carrigan's opinion in Physics Today Dec 2007, to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons, certain rules should be set to prevent the spread of a particular kind of knowledge. Here, I argue that a knowledge blockade does…
A novel recovery of some important documents related to the Fermi course on neutron physics, held at Los Alamos in 1945, is announced. Its relevance for the effective launch of a British nuclear programme in the early postwar period,…
The nuclear force is the heart of nuclear physics and, thus, the significance of this force for all of nuclear physics can hardly be overstated. Research on this crucial force has by now spanned eight decades and we are still not done. I…
The scope of this paper is to discuss the major works that appeared in the period of 1904 to 1913: atomic models proposed by Thomson and Hantaro Nagaoka (1904), Rutherford (1911), and Bohr (1913), and the experimental work that motivated…
Ever since the advent of quantum mechanics, it has been clear that the atoms composing matter do not obey Newton's laws. Instead, their behavior is described by the Schroedinger equation. Surprisingly though, until recently, no clear…
Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…
Three- and four-nucleon reactions are discussed. The focus is on the notion of nuclear potentials, on conceptual and technical issues of calculations and on unresolved problems between existing theoretical predictions and experimental data.…
I combine the effects of Planck length, general relativity and Newtonian gravity in one equation, to come up with a semi-classical model of gravity in the form of deviation from Newtonian gravity. Einstein explained nuclear forces in terms…
After a historical review, I present the progress in the field of realistic NN potentials that we have seen in recent years. A new generation of very quantitative (high-quality/high-precision) NN potentials has emerged. These potentials…
The ideas and results that are in the background of the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics had an immense impact on our understanding of reality. Therefore, it is crucial that these implications reach also the general public, not only the…