AIP History Center Newsletter
Photos and Quotes included in the
Spring 1997 Issue of the CHP Newsletter

Click directly on the photo to see a larger image and the full caption.




At left: John Wheeler (photo credit: Roy Bishop); Center: The Chemical Heritage Foundation; At right: Marcel Brillouin.

"Individuals can achieve great things, and the teacher of history ought to make this clear to his pupils. For without hope nothing of importance is accomplished." --Bertrand Russell




At left: Albert Overhauser; Center: Frank Press; At right: Andrei Sakharov and Igor Kurchatov.

"The times we have lived through are, I believe, truly heroic times.... the achievements in physics in this century seem to me to stand with the high points of the whole history of human knowledge, in the quality of the insight and in the beauty of the work that was done. I think we cannot imagine a century in which Einstein and Bohr lived and did their great work, except as a very special time in the human story." --J. Robert Oppenheimer



At left: J.J. Thomson; Center: Sid Dancoff at bat, Sid Drell (standing) leaning on fence; At right: Mystery Photo. Niels Bohr is at Center with Arthur Compton to his right. Who is the gentleman in the hat?

"Recognizing that a historical discovery is rarely quite the one attributed to its author in later textbooks (pedagogic goals inevitably transform a narrative), the historian should ask what his subject thought he had discovered and what he took the basis of his discovery to be. And in this process of reconstruction the historian should pay particular attention to the subject's apparent errors, not for their own sake but because they reveal far more of the mind at work than do the passages in which a scientist seems to record a result or an argument that modern science still retains." --Thomas Kuhn



At left: Senior Staff of the Shockley Semi-Conductor Laboratory; Center: Walter Brattain; At right: Dr. Toichiro Kinoshita.

"Popular excitement over the use and abuse of history can be both distracting and irritating for historians. But it is also a tribute to the significance of history.... It would be far worse if no one cared what we said or did." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

The S.I. Vavilov State Optical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, functioned in effect as a ministry of optics for the former Soviet Union. A museum has been established to commemorate the Institute's achievements, and efforts are underway to safeguard the records (with assistance from the Friends of the AIP Center for History of Physics). These are some of the many good photographs in the archives.

At left: Optical scientist Dmitry Dmitrievich Maksutov; At right: Vladimir Vladimirovich Ovsjankin.

"For the nonscientist, bored and baffled by the technical problems of sciencs, the history of science may provide some insight into the scientific point of view and prevent the feeling of isolation which too often makes the scientist and the humanist appear to move in separate worlds." --Marie Boas Hall

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