A Winter Wonderland of Physics

Now that it is December and the winter season is upon us, I thought it would be fun to dedicate this December Photos of the Month to one of my favorite parts of winter: Snow! 

There are many snow-filled vistas in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives including snow-capped observatories, physicists sledding and skiing, intrepid mountain climbers and researchers continuing to do experiments despite the snow. We hope you enjoy this glimpse into the winter wonderlands of physicists and astronomers!

Hitting the Slopes:

With many astronomical observatories and labs stationed near (and on) mountains, it is not surprising that many physicists and astronomers enjoy skiing in their spare time. 

At a skiing excursion at Los Alamos, New Mexico, are (left to right, standing) Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Hans Staub, Victor Weisskopf; (sitting) Erika Staub, Elfriede Segrè. Others unidentified. 1943. Credit: Photograph by Emilio Segrè, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection. Fermi Enrico D38

In 1943, during the midst of the Manhattan Project, many of the nation’s top physicists and their families were stationed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is only a few minutes drive from a ski area. Ski excursions like the one shown above were a common way to bond with colleagues and their families while taking a break from work. This photograph was taken by our visual archives’ namesake, Emilio Segrè, who, in addition to being a noted particle physicist, was an amateur photographer and captured many candid and informal moments of his physics friends and family. Here we see a ski group taking a rest at the top of the mountain with their mittens sitting jauntily on their ski poles. Segrè’s wife, Elfriede, smiles for the camera in the center, while physicists Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Hans Staub, and Victor Weisskopf appear engrossed in conversation. One of the unidentified skiers (on the far right with a white backpack and goggles) might be Swiss physicist (and avid skier) Felix Bloch, who was shown this photograph in his 1968 oral history interview with Charles Weiner and remembered going to the mountains to ski with Hans Staub during his brief time in Los Alamos.

(L-R):  Émile Allais, Frederic Joliot-Curie, and Irène Joliot-Curie rest from skiing. Circa 1930. Credit: Institut Curie, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Joliot-Curie Frederic C5

Mountains are also a popular vacation spot! In this photo, Frederic and Irène Joliot-Curie (daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie) take a break from skiing with future world champion alpine ski racer Émile Allais (left). This photo was likely taken near Mont Blanc, where Allais worked as a ski instructor at his uncle’s hotel prior to the start of his illustrious competitive career. Footage of the Joliot-Curie’s 1930 ski trip still exists, digitized by the Brittany Film Archive, and shows the Joliot-Curies skiing and Allais doing tricks! Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of induced radiation in 1935, were avid outdoors people and skiers, a tradition Irène inherited from her mother, Marie Curie, and passed on to her own children. Their daughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, recalls in an oral history how, despite being a family of scientists, her mother did not push academics on her and her brother, instead, it was “better to follow the tradition to have fresh air and sport activities, she insisted it very much that I take time for walking, and doing things that were interesting to my age.” Irène and Frederic ended up purchasing a ski chalet in the Alps in the 1950s when Irène was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a place to convalesce and spend their retirement.

Left to right: Werner Heisenberg, Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, and Carl Weizsacker at Tuxer Joch Peak, Austria. March 27, 1932. Credit: Max-Planck Institute, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Heisenberg Werner D18

Skiing can also be a time to have important discussions about physics. As Felix Bloch puts it, in recalling his many ski trips with Werner Heisenberg. “Well, you see, physics and everyday life were not separate in our lives. It was all the same.” The photo above was taken on a storied ski trip that involved early discussions of positrons. German physicist Werner Heisenberg, while a professor at the University of Leipzig, owned a ski hut in the Alps, to which he would invite students and colleagues for vacations, get togethers, and talking physics. In March 1932, Heisenberg invited Niels Bohr to come to visit for a ski trip. Heisenberg also invited his current student Carl Weizsacker, his former graduate student Felix Bloch, along with Bohr’s son Christiaan and another of Heisenberg’s students, Hans Heinrich Euler (not pictured). The group spent the weekend not only skiing, but having a memorable discussion with Bohr about recent developments towards the discovery of the positron, which both Werner Heisenberg and Carl Weizsacker recall in their oral histories with AIP.

Werner Heisenberg:

We said, "Well, if that idea of the hole is correct, it just means that they are not protons, but there must be other positive particles." But then again, this idea of the holes was so odd so that everybody said, "Well, that's so terribly artificial." At least nobody was too happy about it. Then the positron was found, but that was rather much later in '32. I remember that Bohr did not believe in these things. We had brought one picture of a track — I think by Anderson or somebody — to our skiing hut here in the Bavarian mountains. I went with Bohr and Bloch and Euler and Weizsacker and one of the sons of Bohr to our skiing hut here. One of us had brought a picture of this track and we had long discussions in the hut whether it was actually a positron or was it not. We gradually succeeded in convincing Bohr that it might be a positron. He was not so clear then but it took some time until Bohr would be willing to agree that there was such a positive model of the electron because Bohr, also, felt that now we're getting into a part of physics which again contains difficulties, contradictions. It doesn't really work out as one likes it. So one had this uneasy feeling of' getting into a mess again. That kind of thing.”

Quote from: Session X. Interview of Werner Heisenberg by Thomas S. Kuhn on 1963 February 28, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA. This trip was also discussed in Session III and Session XI interviews of Werner Heisenberg in 1962 and 1963.

Carl Weizsacker:

The discussions we had about the positron which I remember were in Heisenberg’s little hut in the Bavarian Alps where Bohr had been invited for skiing. This must have been in March or April of ‘33^**. At that time Bohr still said that the positron certainly wasn’t true. I remember that the others of us felt that Bohr might very well be mistaken because we all had a general feeling that Bohr had a particular tendency not to believe experimental results. Perhaps “experimental results” is putting it too strongly; for instance, in every day life up in the mountains when someone observed a certain phenomenon, say a certain color fringe in a cloud in the sky, and he tried to explain that by atmospheric phenomena, Bohr would say, “No, that’s just a contrast phenomenon; that’s just physiological,” or that sort of thing. He had a certain tendency not to believe that a phenomenon was objective. We sometimes wondered why. Or, for instance, a phenomenon which we call in German “Kugelblitz” — spherical lightning, spherical electrical discharge. In any case, there are reports about Kugelblitz. At that time I think there were about fifty reports about people who had seen it, printed reports and many oral reports, and Bohr just said, “A Kugelblitz is impossible and doesn’t exist.” When people say that such a Kugelblitz has entered through the window, gone through the room, and gone out of the window again, Bohr said that it was quite clear — they looked out the window on a dark night, there was a lightning flash, they were blinded by it, and then they looked around the room and saw the lightning wherever their eyes went, and that’s the whole story. This was an attitude of Bohr’s which we knew very well, so we didn’t take his opposition to the positron very seriously.

**Note: Our photo is from March 1932, which aligns with Heisenberg's memory of this same trip with Bohr and Bloch in attendance and discussing the positron. However, there is an interview which Heisenberg recalls discussing Carl Anderson’s paper on the positron with Bohr at the ski hut too, but since that was not published until August 1932, it is possible that there was a second ski trip in early March 1933 which the positron was discussed and either Heisenberg or Weizsacker is misremembering or conflating dates (these interviews were taken 30 years later). Felix Bloch, who was Jewish, fled Germany in Spring 1933 due to Hitler’s rise in power, but since he initially relocated to his native Switzerland it may have been possible for him to take part in a second March 1933 ski trip.

Quote from: Interview of Carl Weizsäcker by Thomas S. Kuhn and John L. Heilbron on 1963 July 9, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA

Weizsacker’s oral history also contains an amusing story of Bohr’s arrival to the ski hut being hampered by a recent snowfall.

Urban Scenes

You don’t need to go into the mountains to see snow - here are some scenes of physicists around town enjoying (or perhaps more accurately, “dealing with”) snow:

Martha Schubert, Elizabeth Benedict, and Hedwig Kohn in the snow. Caption on the back of the photo reads: “Scheitnig im Kriege”. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, gift of Dr. Wilhelm Tappe, Kohn Photo Collection. Kohn Hedwig C26

Here we have a lovely snowy scene of German physicists Martha Schubert, Elizabeth Benedict, and Hedwig Kohn taking shelter under a gazebo in Szczytnicki Park [Scheitnig in German] in Wrocław, Poland [formerly Breslau]. The three of them met and earned their doctorates in physics at the University of Breslau and continued on as postdoctoral research assistants at the Physics Institute during World War I, which was ongoing when this photo was taken. Hedwig Kohn and Elizabeth Benedict, who earned their PhDs in 1913 and 1915 respectively, worked for Otto Lummer on illumination technology and radiation measurements, while Martha Schubert, who earned her PhD in 1915, studied under Lummer’s successor, Clemens Schaefer. In 1930, Hedwig Kohn earned habilitation (the qualification for university teaching), making her one of only three women to earn this distinction in Germany prior to World War II, along with Lise Meitner and Hertha Sponer. In 1933, however, Kohn was dismissed from her teaching position due to Nazi regulations barring Jews from government service, resulting in her only being able to take temporary positions and industry work until she immigrated to the United States in 1941. She then became a physics professor and continued her research in spectroscopy, spending much of her career at Wellesley College and Duke University.. This photograph is from a set of Hedwig Kohn’s original scrapbooks  that we are lucky to have here at NBLA. They contain many photographs from her life at the Physics Institute at Breslau before WWII.

Philip Seeger in the snow, Winter 1968. Credit: Photograph by Donald Clayton, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Clayton Collection. Seeger Philip B1

Snow over the winter holidays can be a treat, but usually it is not this much! In December 1967, a massive snowstorm hit northern New Mexico, dumping over five feet of snow in some places. In the aftermath of this storm, we see Philip A. Seeger smiling in front of the giant snow drift blanketing his Los Alamos home. The photographer, noted astrophysicist Donald Clayton, was a friend of Seeger’s from grad school at the Kellogg Radiation Lab at Caltech and was in town to present a colloquium talk on heavy-element nucleosynthesis. Donald Clayton, a professor first at Rice University, then later at Clemson University, is best known for his prediction that supernovae undergo radioactive nucleosynthesis, for which he won the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1992. Philip Seeger spent his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Neutron Science division. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Seeger helped develop the code for the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE)’s  Neutron Instrument Simulation Package (NISP), a tool for designing and optimizing neutron scattering instrumentation using a Monte Carlo simulation.

William Meggers shoveling snow, circa 1939. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W.F. Meggers Collection Meggers William B16

Next, with a shovel that would have probably been much appreciated in the previous photograph, we have spectroscopist William F. Meggers shoveling snow in front of his home in Washington, D.C. Meggers worked for the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, aka NIST) his whole career, starting as a student assistant in 1914 and becoming the head of the spectroscopy division in 1920 until his retirement in 1958. He is often referred to as the “dean of American spectroscopists” and was a pioneer in the field of spectrochemistry. In the 1920s, Meggers and two of his other NBS spectroscopist colleagues, Florence J. Stimson and Carl C. Keiss, purchased neighboring plots of land to build houses for their families on Brandywine Street in Northwest Washington, D.C. This photograph from 1939, is likely taken in front of Meggers’ house. (More on this house can be found in Box 27 of the William F. Megger papers, addition, 1870-1973.)  William Megger’s papers are held here at AIP, as are a collection of home movies from the 1910s-1960s, his portrait gallery of Nobel Laureates, and part of his book collection. In addition, Meggers bequeathed his extensive coin and stamp collection (valued at $50,000) to AIP to fund an award program for high school physics education.

The Work Goes On

While most of this post has celebrated the enjoyment of snow by physicists in leisure time, let's not forget that it can provide a challenging workplace too. Many cosmological and meteorological experiments require remote and extreme locales, meaning physicists sometimes need to be prepared to work in snow year round, not just during the winter time!

Afaf Sabry, Enrico Fermi, Leon van Hove, and others hike through the snow to the Ecole Polytechnique Cosmic Ray Laboratory near the peak of Aiguille du Midi in the French Alps. July 14, 1954. Credit: Photograph by Roy Glauber, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection, gift of Roy Glauber. Fermi Enrico D60

Measuring cosmic rays requires an unobstructed atmosphere and lack of interference from other sources, which means locations often have to be quite remote. Here we see a group of physicists, including Enrico Fermi, trekking through the snow laden Alps in the midst of the summer to reach the Ecole Polytechnique Cosmic Ray Laboratory on the peak of Aiguille du Midi in France. The group here was on a Bastille Day excursion from the Summer School of Physics at Les Houches organized by the school’s director and founder, French physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette. DeWitt-Morette had secured a rare invitation to visit the Ecole Polytechnique Cosmic Ray Laboratory for four people: Enrico Fermi, Leon van Hove, Afaf Sabry, and Roy Glauber, who served as the group’s official photographer. To get to the peak of the mountain, the group had to take rickety open-top bennes or buckets, meant for construction workers (the future cable car system was still under construction) up the mountain and then trek through several steep snow fields to get to the laboratory. The story of this outing is delightfully recounted in Roy Glauber’s Physics Today article, An Excursion with Enrico Fermi, 14 July 1954 from 2002.

Speaking of remote locations, imagine being stationed in Antarctica! The United States Antarctic Program was established in 1959 to maintain a U.S. presence in Antarctica and perform scientific research such as detection of cosmic rays and neutrinos, meteorology, and geology. Founded following the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957-1958), we have photographs from some of the early projects in Antarctica from the 1960s in the ESVA.

L-R: Sir Charles Seymore Wright and Leslie Bowden Quartermain in Herbert Ponting's darkroom on Cape Evans, Antarctica circa 1961. Credit: National Science Foundation, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection USAP C2

In 1961, the U.S. Antarctic Program funded an early mission to restore and preserve the remains of the huts and scientific sites along Cape Evans from Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-1913. In this photograph, Sir Charles Seymore “Silas” Wright, a Canadian physicist who served as a glaciologist on the original Terra Nova expedition, examines the ice covered remains of the interior of Terra Nova photographer Herbert Ponting’s dark room with New Zealand Science Officer Leslie Bowden Quartermain. This mission was Wright’s first return to Antarctica since the end of the tragic expedition nearly 50 years earlier. Today thanks to a recent conservation effort by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, the huts from Scott’s expedition, including Ponting’s dark room, have been restored and turned into a museum.

Birds in the foreground are some of the many thousand Adelie penguins that nest each year at Hallett Station, Antarctica. Mt. Herschel is seen in the background. Circa 1961. Credit: National Science Foundation, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection. USAP H2

The Antarctic research stations are not just limited to scientific residents! In this image we see a nest of Adelie of penguins near Hallett Station, a research outpost founded in 1957 as part of the US-NZ collaboration during the International Geophysical Year. The station burned down in 1964, and was permanently closed in 1973. During its operation, Hallett Station was used to observe and track upper-air meteorological phenomena and auroras. The dome on the right is a RAWIN fiberglass dome designed for tracking weather balloons and housing the upper-air meteorological tracking unit. The central tower was used for auroral observations.

Once Upon an Observatory

When the first big snowfall hits, there is something eerily beautiful about the calm it brings over the landscape. Astronomical observatories are no exception. To close out this POTM here are some of my favorite postcard perfect views of some astronomical observatories blanketed by snow!

Winter scene on Mount Wilson near Observatory in California. Credit: Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives Mount Wilson Observatory H9.

View of the Yerkes Observatory in the snow. Credit: Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Yerkes Observatory Collection. Yerkes Observatory H3.

Lick Observatory covered in snow, located in Mt. Hamilton, CA. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Collection. Lick Observatory H10.