
By Lillian Hoddeson, Ernst Braun, Jurgen Teichmann, Spencer Weart
This landmark paintings chronicles the foundation and evolution of sturdy country physics, which grew to adulthood among 1920 and 1960. The e-book examines the early roots of the sector in business, clinical and inventive efforts and strains them in the course of the Nineteen Fifties, whilst many physicists world wide famous themselves as contributors of a different subfield of physics study established on solids. The e-book opens with an account of clinical and social advancements that preceded the invention of quantum mechanics, together with the discovery of recent experimental skill for learning solids and the institution of the 1st commercial laboratories. The authors set the level for the trendy period through detailing the formula of the quantum box conception of solids. The center of the publication examines six significant issues: the band idea of solids; the phenomenology of imperfect crystals; the puzzle of the plastic homes of solids, solved through the invention of dislocations; magnetism; semiconductor physics; and collective phenomena, the context during which outdated puzzles similar to superconductivity and superfluidity have been eventually solved. All readers attracted to the background of technological know-how will locate this soaking up quantity a necessary source for knowing the emergence of up to date physics.
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Additional info for Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from The History of Solid State Physics
Example text
Brewster not only could classify crystals through their optical behavior, but also succeeded in associating this behavior with particular crystal classes. Only regular crystals were simply refracting. 88 Neumann took the next step, working to understand the mechanical elasticity of crystals. It was a short step for him, since he had already undertaken to connect Fresnel's law of birefringence with fundamental equations of mechanics and had proposed a theory describing the birefringence that is produced in isotropic crystals by mechanical pressure or a thermal gradient.
Other important examples may be found in spectroscopy, where discussions of the thermal vibration of the atoms in solids were intimately connected with infrared techniques, which could be practically applied. That science was more than just an intellectual endeavor became evident to all during the First World War. Those states that had underestimated science as a tool of power now began to take institutional measures along the lines already taken, for example, in Germany, with the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation in 1911.
After the First World War, these organizational efforts were systematically continued, so that solid-state research was institutionalized and financially supported in many places in the 1920s. Review articles, textbooks, handbooks, and conferences of the period provide evidence that themes like "the electrical conductivity of metals" and "the dynamics of crystal lattices" were considered as identifiable 6 Out of the Crystal Maze areas of current research and were already integrated into the main body of physics instruction.