Majorana: from atomic and molecular, to nuclear physics

In the centennial of Ettore Majorana's birth (1906-1938?), we re-examine some aspects of his fundamental scientific production in atomic and molecular physics, including a not well known short communication. There, Majorana critically discusses Fermi's solution of the celebrated Thomas-Fermi equation for electron screening in atoms and positive ions. We argue that some of Majorana's seminal contributions in molecular physics already prelude to the idea of exchange interactions (or Heisenberg-Majorana forces) in his later workson theoretical nuclear physics. In all his papers, he tended to emphasize the symmetries at the basis of a physical problem, as well as the limitations, rather than the advantages, of the approximations of the method employed.Comment: to appear in Found. Phy

PLANNED INCAPACITY TO SUCCEED? POLICY-MAKING STRUCTURE AND POLICY FAILURE

Policies may fail in two analytically distinct ways: they may fail to achieve their goals, or they may fail to retain political support and be terminated. By failing to distinguish between ineffectiveness and political failure, the three most common interpretations of the War on Poverty and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (failure owing to central government incompetence, failure owing to pluralism, and "hidden" success) cannot adequately account for the gap between their ambiguous performance and their clear political failure. To understand these differences, one must understand the effect of America's fragmented political structure on the design and implementation of poverty and unemployment remedies. Under resource constraints and given a large degree of policy discretion, American states in the aggregate have retained their historic resistance to social policies that would increase short-term expenditures and reduce the attractiveness of their business climate. These jurisdictions and their Congressional representatives opposed new fully nationalized initiatives, insisting on policy designs that promised fiscal relief while protecting state and local policy control. National policymakers found that grant-in-aid programs offered the path of least resistance in these circumstances. Although social policy grant programs could win initial approval in Congress, these designs proved to be increasingly unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to control in practice. The programs yielded ambiguous overall results but provided unambiguous examples of waste, fraud and abuse, fueling the perception of failure and contributing to the backlash against these programs and their political failure. Copyright 1988 by The Policy Studies Organization.