James Dewar lecturing at the Royal Institution, London, England, in 1904. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.

Website Q&A

Can I find any voice clips of Einstein on the History Center and Library Website?

Yes. On the Center/Library main page, click on image of Einstein, Marie Curie, and Andrei Sakharov, select “Einstein: Image and Impact” web exhibit, select “More Einstein Info and Links,” and lastly, click on an audio file link.

Whatever a scientist is doing—reading, cooking, talking, playing—science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in; all that is seen is filtered through an ever-present scientific musing.

—Vivian Gornick, Women in Science, p. 39

The greatest event in the world today is not the awakening of Asia, nor the rise of communism—vast and portentious as those events are. It is the advent of a new way of living, due to science, a change in the conditions of work and the structure of society which began not so very long ago in the West, and is now reaching out over all mankind.

—Vannevar Bush

Seated from left to right: S.S. Rao, Abhijit Dey, Devendramohan Bose, Werner Heisenberg, Krishnan Kariamanikkam, and Satyendranath Bose at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta, India. October 8, 1929. Credit: Max-Planck Institute, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Fields of learning are surrounded ultimately only by illusory boundaries, like the ‘rooms’ in a hall of mirrors. It is when the illusion is penetrated that progress takes place. . . . Likewise science cannot be regarded as a thing apart, to be studied, admired or ignored. It is a vital part of our culture, our culture is part of it, it permeates our thinking, and its continued separateness from what is fondly called ‘the humanities’ is a preposterous practical joke on all thinking men.

—William S. Beck, Modern Science and the Nature of Life, 1957

Left to right: Boris S. Dzelepov (in dark suit), Hans Bethe, and Werner Heisenberg outdoors at the International Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, July 4–11, 1962. Photo credit: Michael J. Moravcsik, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Website Q&A

How many editions of James Clerk Maxwell’s watershed work Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism are in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives?

Four: 1873, 1881, 1892, and 1883, plus an authorized German translation, a 20th-century edited edition, and J.J. Thomson’s Notes on recent researches in electricity and magnetism, intended as a sequel to Professor Clerk-Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1893). How to find: On the Center/Library’s main page, click on Books in the left-hand menu. Search for Maxwell as author and Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism as title.

The astonishing successes of western science have not been gained by answering every kind of question, but precisely by refusing to. Science has deliberately set narrow limits to the kinds of questions that belong to it, and further limits to the questions peculiar to each branch. It has practiced an austere modesty, a rejection of claims to universal authority.

—Mary Midgley, “Can Science Save Its Soul?” New Scientist, August 1, 1992

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Birth of Sound of Film. Scene on June 9, 1922, in lecture room 100 of the Physics laboratory, when Professor Joseph T. Tykociner gave the world’s first public demonstration of sound-on-film movies. His work caused the old system of “pictures on film, sound on phonograph discs,” to be discarded. Tykociner is behind the desk, looking at the horn microphone. Beside him is the first sound-picture camera. At far right of the table is the first sound-picture projector. Headphones hanging from the table or a loudspeaker were used to hear the sound. Credit: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Website Q&A

How can I find photos for a class presentation? Say, of one of the first satellites put up by the United States in 1958?

On the History Center home page (www.aip.org/history), click on “Emilio Segrè Visual Archives,” then execute an advanced search with terms like “Explorer” (one of those first satellites) and maybe a name of a famous person involved in the early satellite program, such as Werner von Braun or James Van Allen. You can also search for “Satellite” and see what you get, but it’s a broader term and yields other kinds of items, too.