AIP History Center Newsletter
Photos and Quotes included in the
Spring 2007 Issue of the CHP Newsletter

Click directly on any photo to see a larger image.

Mary Calvert using the 12-inch refractor at Yerkes Observatory, February 23, 1926. She was Edward E. Barnard’s niece, and after his death, co-editor of his book A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way published in 1927 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Yerkes Observatory photo, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
 
A famous shot of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in their garage in Palo Alto, 1939.
The instrument is a “200 series” audio oscillator, Hewlett Packard’s first product. They picked the number because they thought it sounded good. Courtesy Agilent
History Center 		  The physicist Clinton J. Davisson, the first Bell Labs researcher to win a Nobel Prize, in his laboratory, ca. 1930s. Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center

History of science... protects scientists from the sins of dogma—the arrogant belief that science is infallible, unchallenged and final.... It encourages young scientists not to worship what is already known but to question it.

—Pangratios Papacosta
A Bell Labs scientist studies a helium-neon laser to determine the relationship of power output to the length of the cavity, ca. 1963-1964. Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center

By unrolling before [the physics student] the continuous tradition through which the science of each epoch is nourished by the systems of past centuries, through which it is pregnant with the physics of the future; by mentioning to him the predictions that theory has formulated and experiment realized; ... [history] fortifies in him the conviction that physical theory is not merely an artificial system, suitable today and useless tomorrow, but that it is... an increasingly more clear reflection of realities.

--Pierre Duhem

 
T.D. Lee used a doodle pad during talks with C.N. Yang, while both were visiting scientists at Brookhaven in the summer of 1956. These discussions led to questioning the conservation of parity in weak interactions and resulted in their being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957. Courtesy Brookhaven National Laboratory
The main page for the online exhibit on Cosmology:
(http://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology)

Otto Stern (left) and Irving Langmuir in discussion during a conference at Como, Italy, circa 1927. AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

Well known art photographer Berenice Abbott photographed this Log Periodic Antenna (used for studies of refraction
and scintillation of radio stars) at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, Sagamore Hill Radio Observatory, MA.
She worked with Man Ray in Paris in the early 1920s before opening her own studio. She returned to the States in 1929 and
in the late 1950s began to take photographs that illustrated the laws of physics. Photograph by Berenice Abbott, USAF Technial Photo Branch, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

 

“We live today in a world in which poets and historians and men of affairs are proud that they wouldn’t even begin to consider thinking
about learning anything of science, regarding it as the far end of a tunnel too long for any wise man to put his head into.”

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

Robert R. Wilson on the phone. Taken on the occasion of the first 200 GeV beam passing through the Main Ring, making the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL, re-named Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1974) the world’s highest-energy
particle acceleratory laboratory, March 1, 1972. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
 
Nancy Roman with a model of the Orbiting Solar Oberservatory (OSO), circa 1963. NASA photo, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè
Visual Archives, Roman Collection		   Adelaide Ames, Arlow Shapley’s assistant at Harvard College Obserservatory from 1924-1932. She was co-author of the
Shapely-Ames catalogue of bright galaxies. Newspapers report she was “lost by drowning” in 1932. AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Shapley Collection

The large metallic shpere, which Clarence Hewlett is standing beside, was used for evaporating materials, such as selenium, onto blanks in high vacuum at General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, NY. AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archivesn

L-R: J. A. Orange, Leonard D. Dempster, Irving Langmuir, George Hotaling, Willis Rodney Whitney, and William David Coolidge at General Electric Research Laboratory, ca 1912. General Electric Research Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio
Segrè Visual Archives, Hecht Collection

An 18th-century electricity generator, from the book The Forces of Nature: A Popular Introduction to the Study of Physical Phenomena. by Amedee Guillernin, translated from the French by Mrs. Norman Lockyer, and edited with additions and notes by J. Norman Lockyer, F.R.S., 2nd Edition, published by Scribner, Welford and Armstrong, New York, 1873. AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Brittle Books

David Hilbert (left) and James Franck stop to discuss physics, circa 1926 AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Franck Collection

From left to right: Lois and Julian Brodsky, Fred Dylla, Marc and Vivian Brodsky

 

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