Compton\u27s \u27Crucial Test\u27 - Theoretical Preconceptions and Experimental Interpretation

Arthur Holly Compton, as a result of his own research and confidence in the validity of classical electrodynamics, was convinced in 1921 that homogeneous x-rays and gamma rays could be affected in only two possible ways when passing through matter: either they gave rise to truly scattered radiation of the same wavelength as that of the incident rays, or they excited fluorescent radiation of a longer wavelength. When Compton was led to carry out experiments using homogeneous x-rays and actually found secondary radiation of longer wavelength, he regarded his result as a crucial test between the truly scattered and the fluorescent radiation hypotheses and concluded that the latter was correct. More than a year later, late in 1922, Compton realized that he had found the strongest contemporary evidence for the quantum theory of radiation

The age of innocence: nuclear physics between the First and Second World Wars

The two decades between the first and second world wars saw the emergence of nuclear physics as the dominant field of experimental and theoretical physics, owing to the work of an international cast of gifted physicists. Prominent among them were Ernest Rutherford, George Gamow, the husband and wife team of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, the brash Ernest Lawrence, the prodigious Enrico Fermi, and the incomparable Niels Bohr. Their experimental and theoretical work arose from a quest to understand nuclear phenomena; it was not motivated by a desire to find a practical application for nuclear energy. In this sense, these physicists lived in an 'Age of Innocence'. They did not, however, live in isolation. Their research reflected their idiosyncratic personalities; it was shaped by the physical and intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in which they worked. It was also buffeted by the political upheavals after the Great War: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the intellectual migration from Germany and later from Austria and Italy. Their pioneering experimental and theoretical achievements in the interwar period therefore are set within their personal, institutional, and political contexts. Both domains and their mutual influences are conveyed by quotations from autobiographies, biographies, recollections, interviews, correspondence, and other writings of physicists and historians

Amsterdam memories

Chapter 11 of Physics as a Calling : Studies in Honour of A.J. Kox Ed. Ad Maas and Henriëtte Schatz, LUP, 2013, isbn 9789087281984 which can be found at: http://hdl.handle.net/1887/31526Wetensch. publicati