相关论文: Fermi and Szilard

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…

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…

A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…

In the early 1980s, Schwinger made seminal contributions to the semiclassical theory of atoms. There had, of course, been earlier attempts at improving upon the Thomas--Fermi model of the 1920s. Yet, a consistent derivation of the leading…

The coming into light of the neutron is discussed. It is remarked that some experiments had already suggested that the penetrating radiation from beryllium had an electromagnetic component, before Joliot-Curies suggested the beryllium…

On October 22, 1934, in a famous experiment, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues discovered that a significant increase in induced radioactivity can be obtained when neutrons are slowed down by means of hydrogen atoms. This discovery and its…

When Enrico Fermi discovered slow neutrons, he accounted for their great efficiency in inducing radioactivity by merely mentioning the well-known scattering cross-section between neutrons and protons. He did not refer to capture…

In this paper I discuss Enrico Fermi's view of identical particles, taking a lecture that he gave in 1933 as a starting point. Fermi used his lecture as a basis for a paper that was published in 1934: the paper is in italian and is not…

Cosmic rays are deemed to be generated by a process known as ``Fermi acceleration", in which charged particles scatter against magnetic fluctuations in astrophysical plasmas. The process itself is however universal, has both classical and…

The attempts to find the right (underlying) theory for the nuclear force have a long and stimulating history. Already in 1953, Hans Bethe stated that "more man-hours have been given to this problem than to any other scientific question in…

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…

Between the time of the discovery of nuclear fission in early 1939 and the end of 1946, approximately 90 nuclear piles were constructed in six countries. These devices ranged from simple graphite columns containing neutron sources but no…

Correlations between pairs of projectile-like fragments, emitted by the system ${^{16}O}+{^{197}Au}$ at the laboratory bombarding energy of 515 MeV, have been studied under two stipulated conditions: (1) at least one member of the pair is…

We present quantitative measurements on a classic experiment proposed for the first time in 1947 to illustrate the phenomenon of a chain reaction in nuclear fission. The experiment involves a number of mousetraps loaded with solid balls.…

The year 1953 is pivotal for computational physics: the first application of the Monte-Carlo method is published and calculations of the so-called Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou experiment are started. It is the beginning of the massive use in…

The purpose of this study, mainly historical and pedagogical, is to investigate the physical-mathematical similitudes of the spectroscopic and beta decay Fermi theories. Both theories were formulated using quantum perturbative theory that…

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,…

In October 1934 Fermi discovered that neutrons became particularly effective in rendering the elements radioactive after being slowed down by hydrogenous substances. His was described as an absolutely unpredictable scientific discovery. In…

The Bohr--Einstein debate is one of the more remarkable protracted intellectual exchanges in the history of physics. Its influence has been lasting: One of the few clear patterns in a 2013 survey about quantum foundations was that the…

In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…