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Online resources for the history of physics & allied fields

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New links - (Updated July, 2009)

• The Joliot-Curie lab
• History of Astronomy in Canada
• Brief History of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
• Brief History of the Princeton University Physics Department
• Brief History of the Rutgers University Physics Department
• History of the West Virginia University Physics Department
• History of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
• Online Exhibition: "Wolfgang Pauli and Modern Physics"

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History of physics

General  

• The Joliot-Curie web site highlights the exhibition of the same name in France
• Net Advance of Physics also has links, especially to online articles, but many dead links
• PhysLink History of Physics and Astronomy guide - some additional links
• "This week in physics history" (scroll down to find list)
• "This month in physics history" (scroll down to Departments)
• From the Greeks to Einstein, by Michael Fowler: Galileo, Newton, and more
• History of Cosmology from Antiquity to Einstein and beyond by Jose Wudka  
• History of Mathematics Archives includes Topics in history of mathematical physics – with articles on time, light, gravitation and other relativity topics – and biographies of many physicists from Aristotle to Feynman 
• Timeline of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics including a brief history of string theory
• Classic Papers ("chemistry" including atomic physics, thermodynamics, radioactivity)
• Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism
• “Absolute Zero” - Website of TV program , with Milestones in Cold Research
• Guide to Harvard Collection of Scientific Instruments

Before 1900  

• A History of physics (ancient to 19th century) from the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Torricelli’s Discovery of the Vacuum
• Vacuum Technology
• Light: Particle or Wave? – Newton and Huygens
• Herschel's Discovery of Infrared Light, a classroom reconstruction
• 19th Century Physics from VictorianWeb
• A History of Kinetic Theory
• Timeline historical sketches of classical Electromagnetic Theory and Statistical Mechanics & Thermodynamics by Jeff Biggus
• See also this page's list of physicist biographies (Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, etc.)

Since 1900  

• A Century of Physics Timeline 1900–2000 by the American Physical Society (note: opens in a new window!) and video talks at the Centennial meeting plus 20th Century Discoveries in Physics (a short summary for the meeting)
• 20th Century Physics told through Nobel Prizes and a Timeline of Nobel Prize Winners
• History of Mathematics Archives includes texts on the history of Special Relativity, General Relativity, and the Beginning of the Quantum Age
• PhysicsWorld has articles on Quantum Theory and the Nobel Prize etc.(search on "history").
• Contributions of Women to 20th-century physics
• Physics in 1900 streaming audio/video lecture, A. Wroblewski
• The Origins of Quantum Theory by C. Carson (14-page PDF)
• Linus Pauling and the Nature of the Chemical Bond
• Quantum Physics, a personal perspective: lectures by Hans Bethe (audio/video)
• Louis de Broglie's 1923 Wave Mechanics
• Superconductivity - discovery of the BCS theory
• See also this page's list of physicist biographies

Radiation & nuclear

• The X-Ray Century
• Radioactivity: Historical Figures 
• Nuclear Medicine and more in the National Atomic Museum (National Museum of Nuclear Science and History)
• Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues (Manhattan Project & after) has many annotated references
• Nuclear Files and Atomic Archive have documents, timeline, etc. Trinity nuclear weapons history. Internet and the Bomb from NDRC. See also Los Alamos Lab History, The Race for the Superbomb and Manhattan Project links.
• Radiation and Radiation Protection (links only)
• Our exhibit on the Discovery of Fission

Accelerators & particles

• History of particle accelerators (S. Kullander)
• History of Accelerators told through Nobel Prizes
• The Van de Graaf generator
• Harvard University Cyclotrons, Rutgers University Cyclotron photo tour and the RIKEN cyclotron; Physics at Brookhaven National Lab
• The Development of Particle Physics by V. Kudryavtsev (PowerPoint presentations)  
• A Fundamental Particle Timeline and a Brief History of String Theory
• A History of the Detection of the Neutrino, History of Neutrinos and A Neutrino Timeline
• The Fall of Parity (1956 experiment)

Useful devices

• The Transistor -- our most-visited exhibit
• The Transistor Museum
• Laser History and Laser at Bell Labs
• Short History of Fiber Optics
• Bell's Path to the Telephone
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• History of the Quartz Watch
• Mass Spectrometry
• Physics Success Stories from AIP — how taxpayers supported advances in energy and the environment, medical imaging, transportation, telecommunications, lasers, new materials, the Global Positioning System, etc.
• History of the Internet — mainly the work of physicists!
• Contributions of Physics to the Information Age (I.P. Bindloss)
• History of Silicon Valley. 
• More electrical technology links from IEEE.

People

• Many short biographies of physicists are in the History of Mathematics Archives
• Nobel Prize Laureates and (for multimedia users) the Nobel Channel
• National Academies' Biographical Memoirs (enter “biographical memoirs” and a scientist’s name)
• Contributions of Women to 20th-century physics is a big store of information. See also Distinguished Women in Physics and women in astronomy below.
• Physiciens d'hier (in French)
• 17th and 18th century math/physics biographies
• Short profiles: Famous scientists related to electricity, Electromagnetic Personalities, an Anecdotal History of Optics, and a Thumbnail History of Electronics by L. Taylor
• Physicists on the Money, honored on banknotes

Alphabetical list of physicists

These are not listed because they're the most important people, but because the Websites are especially good or interesting. To locate archival collections, interviews, etc. for an individual, consult our International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences.

• Archimedes
• John Bahcall, an interview
• John Bell
• Niels Bohr's Nobel biography, another short biography; the Bohr Archives including Bohr-Heisenberg letters
• Robert Boyle
• Marie Curie; Marie Curie and US Radium Standards
• Robert Dicke and relativity by J. Zirker
• P.A.M. Dirac
• Albert Einstein and our Einstein links
• Michael Faraday 
• Richard Feynman and Feynman Links
• Feynman talks: Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Robb Memorial Lectures (video)
• Franklin Tercentenary 1706-2006; Ben Franklin, scientist; Franklin's Kite
• Galileo's Battle by PBS-Nova and the Trial of Galileo; Galileo, Copernicus & Mathematical Physics; the Galileo Project and a manuscript; Article on the Tower of Pisa Legend; Galileo and Renaissance Art
• William Rowan Hamilton
• Stephen Hawking's Page and Hawking Page by N. Donaldson
• Werner Heisenberg
• Robert Hooke, Natural Philosopher (BBC) and RobertHooke.org (Westminster School)
• Joseph Henry
• Christiaan Huygens
• Igor Kurchatov
• Karl Lark-Horovitz
• E.O. Lawrence and the cyclotron; Lawrence and his laboratory
• James Clerk Maxwell; his youth; BBC radio production on Maxwell (streaming audio)
• Isaac Newton Links, the Newton Project including manuscripts; a Newton Chymistry and optics notebook
• Emmy Noether by N. Byers
• Frank Oppenheimer and his Exploratorium
• Linus Pauling, his research notebooks and work on the nature of the chemical bond
• Max Planck
• I. I. Rabi (J. Rigden)
• Ernest Rutherford
• Andrei Sakharov 
• Erwin Schrodinger
• Julian Schwinger by K. Milton
• Glenn Seaborg 
• Arnold Sommerfeld archive (in German)
• Leo Szilard page 
• Eugene Wigner 

History of astronomy/space science/geophysics/

• History of Astronomy Page (University of Bonn, Germany), with many links to observatories, biographies, etc.
• Greek and Arab Astronomy (Vatican books)
• From Stargazers to Starships (astronomy, rocketry) by David Stern
• Greeks to Kepler "The Starry Messenger" from Cambridge
• The Development of Astronomy, Copernicus to Newton, with explanations (Univ. of Tenn.)
• A History of Astronomical Spectroscopy
• Great Debates in Astronomy 1920-1998 scale of the universe, cosmology
• Histories of X-ray Astronomy (lists satellites) and of Infrared Astronomy
• X-ray Astronomy at Goddard 1965–1990
• History of High-Energy Astrophysics
• Online exhibition: "Wolfgang Pauli and Modern Physics"
• Our exhibit on A Pulsar Discovery

Planets, space science, geophysics

• The Face of the Moon, Galileo to Apollo, in pictures
• Geomagnetism from Gilbert to space physics
• The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery (text of book by W. Sheehan)
• The 18th Century Transit of Venus; the 1882 Venus Transit observed in S. Africa
• A History of Comet Studies
• The NASA History page including Sputnik and the Early Space Age; online books, etc.
• Exploration of the Magnetosphere
• History of Radiation Geophysics
• Raymond Davis's Solar Neutrino Experiments with historical press releases and video
• NOAA's atmospheric and ocean sciences links
• Plate Tectonics and Wegener, Continental Drift by J. Tuzo Wilson, and related historical images
• The First International Polar Year (1881–1884)
• The Discovery of Global Warming

People

(To locate archival collections, interviews, etc. for an individual, consult our International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences. )

• Bruce Medalists (notable astronomers)
• Distinguished Women in Astronomy, Women in Astronomy by U. Toronto, History of Women in Astronomy by S. Stephens (Astronomical Society of the Pacific)
• Notable Geophysicists (American Geophysical Union honors)
• NOAA's biographies: Coast & Geodetic Survey
  
• Brahe: "The Noble Dane: Images of Tycho Brahe"
• Edwin Hubble by A. Sandage
• J.C. Kapteyn
• Maria Mitchell
• Alfred Wegener

Histories of institutions

Mainly physics  

• Acoustical Society of America
• American Association of Physics Teachers
• American Institute of Physics
• Argonne National Lab
• AVS Society History
• Bell Labs/Lucent
• Berkeley: A Century of Physics; Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
• Caltech History (J. Goodstein)
• Case Western Reserve Physics Dept. history
• The Cavendish Lab, Cambridge
• Columbia University Department of Physics
• CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences)
• Cornell Physics
• Duke Physics
• Electrical/electronics corporations from IEEE
• Hanford reactor site
• Harvard Physics Department and Harvard University Cyclotrons
• The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
• The Joliot-Curie lab
• Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory stories
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Michigan Tech physics
• National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S.)
• Niels Bohr Institute (Copenhagen)
• Nuclear physics at Notre Dame
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Oxford University — History of Physics
• Physics in Australia to 1945
• Physics in Italy (Archivio di Storia della Fisica)
• Princeton Mathematics: interviews with Bardeen, Bargmann, Wigner, etc.
• Princeton University Physics Department: A brief history
• Purdue University — History of Physics
• RAND corporation
• Rutgers University Physics Department
• Stanford University Physics Department
• U.S. Science Policy and Early Cold War (W. Golden)
• University of Arkansas — History of the Physics department
• The University of Chicago's Department of Physics — Historical Sketch
• Wesleyan University Physics
• West Virginia University Physics Department
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

Astronomy/space science/geophysics 

• American Astronomical Society
• National Aeronautics & Space Administration (and its labs)
• Astronomy in Hawaii
• U. Michigan Observatories
• National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
• Observatoires de Paris: historique en français; short version in English
• Royal Observatory, Greenwich
• Uppsala Astronomical Observatory
• Mt. Wilson Observatory
• Yerkes Observatory
  
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• NOAA - oceans and weather
• History of the National Weather Service

Picture sources

• AIP's Emilio Segrè Visual Archives has the largest selection
• Portraits of Physicists from Univ. of Frankfurt
• A Home Movie from the 1927 Solvay Conference
• Images of physicists on postage stamps and Physicists on banknotes
• Gallery of Physicists from the University of Rio de Janeiro
• Images of Physicists from University of California-Santa Barbara
• Caltech Archives PhotoNet
• Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Photos
• NOAA photo archives (weather, oceans)
• Nuclear Astrophysics Photo Archives
• Old Astronomy Pictures ("DAHAP")

General physics - General history

• PhysicsCentral has lots of information and features for the curious
• Got a physics question? Try Scientific American's "Ask the Experts"
• PhysLink calls itself the "ultimate physics resource"
• Physics 2000 from the University of Colorado - learn using interactive animations
• General History Links from the University of Kansas
• History of Physics Links and Other Physics Links by Net Advance of Physics - MIT

General history of science links, information

• Virtual Center for Science, Technology, and Medicine (ECHO) has many links in all areas
• Science Studies Resources (Univ. of Missouri - Kansas City)
• History of Science Guide from the History of Science Society

History of science community

• Join discussion on the H-Net Listserv for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
• Charles Babbage Institute - Center for the History of Information Processing (U. Minnesota)
• Bakken Library for electricity and magnetism in life science and medicine
• The Chemical Heritage Foundation, including the Othmer Library and Beckman Center for history of chemistry
• IEEE History Center and its Newsletter
• NASA History Office (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

Societies & committees  

• The History of Science Society is a rich resource for scholars. Membership Directory
• The British Society for the History of Science
• The American Physical Society's Forum on the History of Physics and its newsletter
• Institute of Physics (UK) History of Physics Group
• The American Astronomical Society's Historical Astronomy Division
  and the International Astronomical Union's Commission 41: History of Astronomy
• The American Geophysical Union's History of Geophysics Committee
• German Commission on History of Geophysics
• International Commission on History of Meteorology
• The Society for Social Studies of Science and its newsletter Technoscience
• SHOT - Society for the History of Technology
• The IEEE's Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT)
• ICOHTEC: International Committee for the History of Technology
• The IUHPS Scientific Instrument Commission
• Philosophy of Science Association

Archival resources

• Our International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences
• Our Physics History Finding Aids
• The Online Archive of California
• Oaister Open Archive harvester
• U. Idaho's Repositories of Primary Sources lists thousands of Websites
• Internet archival resources (from Tulane) lists major links that link onward to countless resources for archives and history
• UNESCO's world archives portal
• The Society of American Archivists
• US National Archives & Records Administration
• The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)
• Inventory of Sources for History of Twentieth-Century Physics
• Guide to Sources for Air & Space History (NASM)

Archives of individual scientific institutions

• American Philosophical Society Library
• CalTech Archives and oral histories
• CERN Archives
• CNRS Archives (in French)
• Deutsches Museum Archives, Munich
• The Einstein Papers Project (CalTech)
• Albert Einstein Archives (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Einstein Archives Online
• Lick Observatory Mary Lea Shane Archives
• The Lincei Academy (Italian letter database)
• Fermilab Archives
• IEEE History Center interviews (many physicists)
• Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
• National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council Archives
• National Air and Space Museum -- Space History
• Niels Bohr Archive
• Rockefeller Archive Center
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives
• Smithsonian Institution
• University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Library
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Reports on materials in selected archives

From our Newsletter:
• Agilent Technologies
• American Philosophical Society Library
• American Meteorogical Society Library and Archives
• The AT&T Archives and History Center
• The Bakken Library and Museum (Electricity and Biomedicine)
• Bristol University
• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge
• Columbia University Archives
• CSIRO
• German Physical Society Archive
• History of Science Archive at the Museum of Astronomy, Rio de Janeiro
• Imperial College, London
• Joseph Rotblat's Archive: Some Anomalies and Difficulties
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• The Max Planck Society
• MIT Institute Archives
• National Academy of Sciences
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• National Radio Astronomy Observatory
• Radium Institute, Paris
• Smithsonian Institution Archives and oral history interviews
• Strasbourg University
• University of Albany, SUNY
• University of Minnesota Library
• University of Oklahoma Libraries
• University of Chicago Library
• US Presidential Libraries: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Harry S. Truman Library,
  Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, John F. Kennedy Library, Lyndon B. Johnson Library,
  Richard Nixon Library, Jimmy Carter Library, Ronald Reagan Library