10. Peter Heering, “On Coulomb's Inverse Square Law,” American Journal of Physics 60 (1992): 990.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 991. The American Journal of Physics selected Heering's paper as one of its most memorable articles: Robert H. Romer, “Editorial: Sixty Years of the American Journal of Physics—More Memorable Papers,” American Journal of Physics 61, no. 2 (1993): 103–6.
13. John L. Heilbron, “On Coulomb's Electrostatic Balance,” in Christine Blondel and Matthias Dörries, eds., Restaging Coulomb: Usages, Controverses et Réplications autour de la Balance de Torsion; Biblioteca di Nuncius, vol. 15 (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 151–61, see p. 151.
14. Christian Licoppe, “Coulomb et la ‘Physique Experimentale’: Pratique Instrumentale et Organisation Narrative de la Preuve,” in Restaging Coulomb (1994), 67–83.
15. Heilbron, “On Coulomb's Electrostatic Balance,” 156.
16. Christine Blondel and Bertrand Wolff, Coulomb invente une balance pour l'électricité, film, narrated by Stéphane Pouyllau (experiments at the Lycée Emile-Zola, Rennes), with documentation by Marie-Hélène Wronecki, www.ampere.cnrs.fr, accessed 1 June 2008, trans. Martínez.
17. For a complete account, see Alberto A. Martínez, “Replication of Coulomb's Torsion Balance Experiment,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 60 (2006): 517–63.
18. I do not know why Heering did not obtain results similar to Coulomb's; I haven't inspected his torsion balance. A video of the experiment by Wolff, at least, shows that parts of Wolff's device were defective; e.g., one of the carriers of charge was neither spherical nor smooth; see Blondel and Wolff, “Coulomb invente.”
CHAPTER 8. THOMSON, PLUM-PUDDING, AND ELECTRONS
1. Rubén Martínez, “Plum Pudding and the Folklore of Physics” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Cambridge, Mass., 2003); ibid. (unpublished manuscript, University of Texas at Austin, 2007).
2. James Arnold Crowther, Molecular Physics, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston's Son and Co., 1919), 94: “The problem becomes much simpler if we assume that the positive electrification occupies the whole volume of a sphere co-extensive with the atom, and that the electrons are embedded in it like raisins in a pudding. An atom of this kind was suggested by Lord Kelvin, and has been worked out in detail by Sir J. J. Thomson.”
3. Peter Guthrie Tait, Properties of Matter, 4th ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1899), 21: “A much more plausible theory is that matter is continuous (i.e. not made up of particles situated at a distance from one another) and compressible, but intensely heterogenous; like a plum-pudding, for instance, or a mass of brick-work.” In 1900, George FitzGerald rejected Joseph Larmor's claims that mechanical physics should be replaced by purely mathematical expressions, and FitzGerald then voiced “his preference for ‘plum-pudding' physics—for brass wheels and bands…rather than an equation with integrals in it.” Meeting of the British Association, discussed in: Observatory, Monthly Review of Astronomy 23, no. 297 (October 1900): 391.
4. Among the historians who have discussed this topic are Isobel Falconer, Stuart M. Feffer, Nadia Robotti, Theodore Arabatzis, and Graeme Gooday; this chapter owes greatly to their works.
5. J. J. Thomson, “Presidential Address to the British Association,” British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report (1909): 29.
6. Max Planck to Carl Runge, 9 December 1878, and 4 March 1879, Carl Runge Papers, Staatsbibliothek Preussischerkulturbesitz; see also John Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 10.
7. Robert A. Millikan, Autobiography (New York: Prentice Hall, 1950), 269–70.
8. J. J. Thomson, “Cathode Rays,” Electrician 21 (May 1897), 104–11; J. J. Thomson, “Cathode Rays,” Philosophical Magazine 44 (October 1897): 293–316.
9. Jean Perrin, “Nouvelles proprietés des Rayons Cathodiques,” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris 121, no. 27 (30 December 1895): 1130–34; translation: “New Experiments on Kathode Rays,” Nature 53 (30 January 1896): 298–99.
10. Some of Thomson's cathode ray tubes are on display, see “The Discovery of the Electron: Electrical Discharges in Gases,” Museum of the Cavendish Laboratory, www.outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphy/museum/area2/cabinet3.htm, accessed 1 June 2008.
11. William Crookes, On Radiant Matter. A Lecture Delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: Davey, 1879), 15.
12. Ibid., 30.
13. Arthur Schuster, “The Bakerian Lecture: Experiments on the Discharge of Electricity through Gases. Sketch of a Theory,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 37 (1884): 317–39; see pp. 318, 331–33.
14. Arthur Schuster, “The Bakerian Lecture: The Discharge of Electricity through Gases,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 47 (1889–1890), 526–61; see pp. 545–47. See also Schuster, The Progress of Physics During 33 Years (1875–1908): Four Lectures Delivered to the University of Calcutta, March 1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 64–67.
15. Schuster, Progress, 59.
16. Stoney based his conclusions on the phenomena of electrolysis and the spectra of gases. G. J. Stoney, “On the Cause of Double Lines and of Equidistant Satellites in the Spectra of Gases,” Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society, 2nd ser. 4 (1891): 583.
17. Heinrich Hertz, “Über den Durchgang der Kathodenstrahlen durch dünne Metallschichten [November 1891],” Annalen der Physik und Chemie 45 (1892): 28–32.
18. Philipp Lenard, “Über Kathodenstrahlen in Gasen von atmosphaersichem Druck und im äussersten Vacuum,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (January 1893): 3–7; expanded version in Annalen der Physik und Chemie 51, no. 2 (1894): 225–67.
19. Philipp Lenard, “Über die magnetische Ablenkung der Kathodenstrahlen,” Annalen der Physik und Chemie 52 (1894): 23–33.
20. Jean Perrin, “Nouvelles proprietés des Rayons Cathodiques,” Comptes Rendus 121 (1895): 1130–34.
21. Working at the Institute and the Society for the Promotion of German Science, in Bohemia, Jaumann immersed a pear-shaped cathode ray tube in a vat of oil, running a weak electric current between the cathode and the anode (the latter being outside of the tube, but in the oil). By holding a rubbed glass rod near the tube, he found that the cathode rays were strongly deflected. He also succeeded in stretching the cathode rays and altering their intensity, to brighten or dim. By contrast to magnetic deflection, he found that electrostatic deflection was a rapidly transient effect. G. Jaumann, “Elektrostatische Ablenkung der Kathodenstrahlen,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Mathematische und Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse 105 Abt. IIa. (April 1896): 291–306; also in: Wiener Anzeiger 111–14 (1896), 121–22; and in (Wiedemann's) Annalen der Physik und Chemie 295 no. 10 [alternate numbering 59, no.1] (1896): 252–66. Gustav Jaumann, “Über die Interferenz und die elektrostatische Ablenkung der Kathodenstrahlen,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaffen, Wien, Mathematische und Naturwissenschafliche Klasse, 106 Abt. IIa (March and April, 1897), 533–50. Jaumann had developed the view that cathode rays consist of “longitudinal light,” that is, longitudinal vibrations of the ether. See Jaumann, “Longitudinales Licht,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Abt. IIa, 104, 7–10 (1895): 747–92; also in Ann. d. Phys. 293 [alternate numbering 57], no. 1 (1896): 147–84.
22. For example, the History Center of the American Institute of Physics states that before Thomson, “All attempts had failed when physicists tried to bend cathode rays with an electric field.” See American Institute of Physics, “The Discovery of the Electron / 3 Experiments, 1 Big Idea,” text by Kent Staley, ed. Spencer Weart, http://www.aip.org/history/electron/jj1897.htm, accessed January 2010.
23. Theodore Arabatzis, “Rethinking the ‘Discovery’ of th
e Electron,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 27, no. 4 (1996): 405–35, see p. 423.
24. Pieter Zeeman, “The Effect of Magnetisation on the Nature of Light Emitted by a Substance,” Nature 55 (11 February 1897): 347; Zeeman, “On the Influence of Magnetism on the Nature of the Light Emitted by a Substance,” Philosophical Magazine 43 (March 1897): 226–39; Zeeman, “Doubles and Triplets in the Spectrum Produced by External Magnetic Forces,” Philosophical Magazine 44 (July 1897): 55–60.
25. Zeeman to Oliver Lodge, 24 January 1897, quoted in Arabatzis, “Rethinking,” 424. In his paper of February 1897, Zeeman announced this “direct evidence of the existence of ions” (“Effect,” 347).
26. Emil Wiechert, “Ergebniss einer Messung der Geschwindigkeit der Kathodenstrahlen [7 January 1897]” Schriften der Physikalisch-ökonomisch Gesellschaft zu Königsberg 38 (1897): 3, trans. Martínez.
27. Walter Kaufmann, “Die magnetische Ablenkbarkeit der Kathodenstrahlen und ihre Abhängigkeit vom Entladungspotential [April 1897],” Annalen der Physik und Chemie, series 3, 61 (June 1897): 544–52; W. Kaufmann and E. Aschkinass, “Ueber die Deflexion der Kathodenstrahen,” Ann. der Phys. u. Chem. 62 (November 1897): 588–95. Kaufmann, “Nachtrag zu der Abhandlung: ‘Die magnetische Ablenkbarkeit der Kathodenstrahlen,’” Ann. der Phys. u. Chem. 62 (1897): 596–98. Kaufmann willfully abstained from endorsing the claim that cathode rays consist of charged particles.
28. For discussion, see George E. Smith, “J. J. Thomson and the Electron, 1897–1899,” in Histories of the Electron, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and Andrew Warwick (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 42–43; and Graeme Gooday, “The Questionable Matter of Electricity: The Reception of J. J. Thomson's ‘Corpuscle’ among Electrical Theorists and Technologists,” in Buchwald and Warwick, Histories of the Electron, 112.
29. Lord Rayleigh IV, The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 91.
30. Philipp Lenard, Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, vol. 3 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1944), 1.
31. J. J. Thomson, “On the Existence of Masses Smaller than the Atoms” (report of the Sixty-Ninth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Dover, September 1899), published as “On the Masses of the Ions in Gases at Low Pressures,” Philosophical Magazine 48 (1899): 547–67.
32. Moreover, in the 1899 paper, Thomson rightly characterized the negative electron as the fundamental factor in the ionization of gases and their electrical discharges (denying an imagined positive electron), a major contribution to research on electrical conduction, as emphasized by Smith, “J. J. Thomson,” 21–76.
33. Nadia Robotti and Francesca Pastorino, “Zeeman's Discovery and the Mass of the Electron,” Annals of Science 55 (1998): 161–83.
34. Schuster, Progress (1908), 71.
35. P. Curie and M. Curie, “Les nouvelles substances radioactives et les rayons qu'elles émettent,” in Rapports présentés au Congrès international de physique réuni à Paris en 1900, Tome III: Électro-optique et ionization, ed. Lucien Poincaré and Charles-Édouard Guillaume (Paris: Gauthier-Villars), 79–114.
36. Patrick Matthew, “Stewart's Planter's Guide, and Sir Walter Scott's Critique,” in On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831), 308: “Man's interference, by preventing this natural process of selection among plants, independent of the wider range of circumstances to which he introduces them, has increased the difference in varieties, particularly in the more domesticated kinds; and even in man himself, the greater uniformity, and more general vigour among savage tribes, is referrible to nearly similar selecting law—the weaker individual sinking under the ill treatment of the stronger, or under the common hardship.” See also his appendix, pp. 364–67, 387.
37. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, with original omissions restored [manuscript 1876–1882], ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 125.
38. George Francis FitzGerald, “Dissociation of Atoms,” Electrician 39 (1897): 104. Arabatzis also points out that William Sutherland made a similar proposal in 1899 (“Rethinking,” 429). See also Gooday, “Questionable Matter,” 111.
39. John Zeleny, quoted in George Jaffé, “Recollections of Three Great Laboratories,” Journal of Chemical Education 29 (1952): 236.
40. Owen W. Richardson, The Electron Theory of Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 3.
41. See Gooday, “Questionable Matter,” 114; on Armstrong, see Lord Rayleigh, The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 113–14. In 1901, Ernest Rutherford noted that chemists at McGill University opposed Thomson's theory; see Rutherford to Thomson, 26 March 1901, in A. S. Eve, Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 77; “The British Association at Dover,” Electrician 43 (1899): 772–73.
42. Arabatzis, “Rethinking,” 433.
43. Edmund Edward Fournier D'Albe, The Electron Theory: A Popular Introduction to the New Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, with a preface by G. Johnstone Stoney (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 4.
44. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London: J. Burns, 1874). About the medium, the fifteen-year-old girl Florence Cook, Crookes noted, “Every test that I have proposed she has at once agreed to submit to with the utmost willingness.”
45. Peter Achinstein, “Who Really Discovered the Electron?” in Buchwald and Warwick, Histories of the Electron, 403–24.
46. Bruce J. Hunt, “Review of Histories of the Electron,” in British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2005): 117–18.
47. E. A. Davis and I. Falconer, J. J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 134.
48. Richard T. Glazebrook, “How Research Has Helped Electrical Engineering,” in Practical Electrical Engineering, ed. E. Molloy, rev. ed., vol. 1 (1931), 3–7; quoted in Gooday, “The Questionable Matter,” 125.
49. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 55.
50. Kaufmann, “Die magnetische” (1897), 544.
CHAPTER 9. DID EINSTEIN BELIEVE IN GOD?
1. Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. and trans. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: The Library of Living Philosophers/George Banta Publishing Company, 1949), 3.
2. Maja Winteler-Einstein, “Albert Einstein—Beitrag für sein Lebensbild” [1924], in John Stachel, ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), xlvii–xlvi.
3. Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord…The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 38.
4. Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” 9.
5. Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” 17, 5.
6. John Stachel, “Albert Einstein: The Man Beyond the Myth,” Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’ (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2002), 3–11.
7. Albert Einstein to Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, 15 September 1919, Albert Einstein Archives, item 22–261, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. (hereafter Einstein Archives); Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, Reality and Scientific Truth (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 74.
8. Einstein, May 1921, in Princeton, New Jersey (in response to experimental work by D. C. Miller): “Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.” The phrase is often translated as “Subtle is the Lord, but not malicious.” Oscar Veblen, professor of mathematics at Princeton, heard Einstein's remark, and he later asked Einstein whether the words could be chiseled onto the frame of a fireplace in the newly constructed building of mathematics, Fine Hall, room 202. And so they were, in 1930; the mathematics department has since moved. Banesh Hoffmann, Helen Dukas, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 146.
9. Albert Einstein to Max Born, 4 December
1926, Einstein Archives, item 8–180: “Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, dass der nicht würfelt.” In a later letter, Einstein wrote, “Es scheint hart, dem Herrgott in seine Karten zu gucken. Aber dass er würfelt und sich ‘telepatischer’ Mittel bedient (wie es ihm von der gegenwärtigen Quanten-Theorie zugemutet wird) kann ich keinen Augenblick glauben,” translation: “It seems hard, to look at the Lord God's cards. But that he rolls dice and uses ‘telepathic’ means (as is expected of him by the present quantum-theory) I can not believe for a moment.” Einstein to Cornelius Lanczos, 21 March 1942, Einstein Archives, item 15–298, trans. Martínez.
10. Albert Einstein, “Science and Religion” (address at the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, New York, 1940); reissued as Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1954), 46.
11. Albert Einstein, “What I Believe,” Forum and Century 84 (1930): 193–94; reprinted in Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 8.
12. Albert Einstein, Gelegentliches (Berlin: Soncino Gesellschaft, 1929), 9; reissued as “On Scientific Truth,” in Ideas and Opinions, 262.
13. Einstein, interview by George Sylvester Viereck, 1929; in Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (New York: Duckworth, 1930), 447. See also Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, 17.
14. Einstein, handwritten sentence on a letter from A. M. Nickerson to Einstein, 17 July 1953, Einstein Archives, item 36–552. See also Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 220.
15. Albert Einstein to Murray W. Gross, 26 April 1947, Einstein Archives, item 58–243.
16. Albert Einstein to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, 25 April 1929, Einstein Archives, item 33–272.
17. Elisabeth Bergner, Bewundert und Viel Gescholten: Elisabeth Bergners unordentl. Erinnerungen (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1978), 212.
18. Albert Einstein to P. Wright, 24 January 1936, Einstein Archives, item 52–336 (see also 41–746, 42–599, 42–601, 52–335); Albert Einstein: The Human Side, ed. Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 32–33.
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