Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T02:57:42.524Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: Physics, Technology, and Technics during the Interwar Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Shaul Katzir
Shaul Katzir*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University E-mail: skatzir@tau.ac.il
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never be fully ready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.

Type
Introduction
Information
Science in Context , Volume 31 , Issue 3: Interactions of Interwar Physics: Technology, Instruments, and Other Sciences , September 2018 , pp. 251 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aaserud, Finn. 1990. Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, Philanthropy and the Rise of Nuclear Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Anduaga, Aitor. 2009. Wireless and Empire: Geopolitics, Radio Industry and Ionosphere in the British Empire, 1918–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anduaga, Aitor. 2015. Geophysics, Realism, and Industry: How Commercial Interests Shaped Geophysical Conceptions, 1900–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Beyer, Robert Thomas. 1999. Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: American Institute of Physics.Google Scholar
Boersma, Kees. 2002. Inventing Structures for Industrial Research: A History of the Philips National Laboratory, 1914–1946. Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Cahan, David. 1989. An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cardwell, Donald. 2001. Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology. Reprint edition. W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Clarke, Sabine. 2010. “Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916–1950.” Isis 101:285–311.Google Scholar
Cochrane, Rexmond Canning. 1976. Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards. New York: Arno Press.Google Scholar
Dennis, Michael Aaron. 1987. “Accounting for Research: New Histories of Corporate Laboratories and the Social History of American Science.” Social Studies of Science 17 (3):479–518.Google Scholar
Edgerton, David. 2011. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Forman, Paul. 1987. “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18:149–229.Google Scholar
Godin, Benoit. 2006. “The Linear Model of Innovation: The Historical Construction of an Analytical Framework.” Science, Technology & Human Values 31 (6):639–67.Google Scholar
Heilbron, John L., and Seidel, Robert W.. 1989. Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hoddeson, Lillian. 1981. “The Emergence of Basic Research in the Bell Telephone System, 1876–1915.” Technology and Culture 22: 512–44.Google Scholar
Homburg, Ernst. 1992. “The Emergence of Research Laboratories in the Dyestuffs Industry, 1870–1900.” The British Journal for the History of Science 25:91–111.Google Scholar
Hong, Sungook. 1999. “Historiographical Layers in the Relationship between Science and Technology.” History and Technology 15 (4):289–311.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David A. 1996. “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States.” In Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, edited by Rosenbloom, Richard S. and Spencer, William J, 13–85. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David A., and Smith, John K.. 1988. Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Jeff. 1998. “Plasticine and Valves: Industry, Instrumentation and the Emergence of Nuclear Physics.” In The Invisible Industrialist, edited by Gaudillière, Jaen-Paul and Löwy, Ilana, 58–101. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Israel, Giorgio. 2004. “Technological Innovation and New Mathematics: Van Der Pol and the Birth of Nonlinear Dynamics.” In Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems, 52–77. Birkhäuser, Basel.Google Scholar
Kaiser, David. 2002. “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33: 131–59.Google Scholar
Katzir, Shaul. 2012. “Who Knew Piezoelectricity? Rutherford and Langevin on Submarine Detection and the Invention of Sonar.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 66 (2):141–57.Google Scholar
Katzir, Shaul. 2016. “Pursuing Frequency Standards and Control: The Invention of Quartz Clock Technologies.” Annals of Science 73 (1):1–39.Google Scholar
Katzir, Shaul. 2017. ‘“In War or in Peace:” The Technological Promise of Science Following the First World War.” Centaurus 59 (3):223–37.Google Scholar
Kevles, Daniel J. 1990. “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–56.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20:239–64.Google Scholar
Kirchhoff, Jochen. 2003. “Wissenschaftsförderung und forschungspolitische Prioritäten der Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft 1920–1932.” Ph.d. diss. Munich: LMU.Google Scholar
Kline, Ronald R., and Lassman, Thomas C.. 2005. “Competing Research Traditions in American Industry: Uncertain Alliances between Engineering and Science at Westinghouse Electric, 1886–1935.” Enterprise and Society 6:601–45.Google Scholar
Layton, Edwin T. 1987. “Through the Looking Glass, or News from Lake Mirror Image.” Technology and Culture 28:594–607.Google Scholar
Leslie, Stuart W. 1993. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lowen, Rebecca S. 1991. “Transforming the University: Administrators, Physicists, and Industrial and Federal Patronage at Stanford, 1935–49.” History of Education Quarterly 31:365–88.Google Scholar
Marcovich, Anne, and Shinn, Terry. 2012. “Regimes of Science Production and Diffusion: Towards a Transverse Organization of Knowledge.” Scientiae Studia 10 (SPE):33–64.Google Scholar
Moseley, Russell. 1978. “The Origins and Early Years of the National Physical Laboratory: A Chapter in the Pre-History of British Science Policy.” Minerva 16:222–50.Google Scholar
Mumford, Lewis. 1946. Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reich, Leonard S. 1985. The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.Google Scholar
Schubert, H. 1987. “Industrielaboratorien für Wissenschaftstransfer. Aufbau und Entwicklung der Siemensforschung bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges anhand von Beispielen aus der Halbleiterforschung.” Centaurus 30:245–92.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven. 2008. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shinn, Terry. 2008. Research-Technology and Cultural Change: Instrumentation, Genericity, Transversality. Oxford: The Bardwell Press.Google Scholar
Smith, John Kenly. 1990. “The Scientific Tradition in American Industrial Research.” Technology and Culture 31:121–31.Google Scholar
Vincenti, Walter G. 1990. What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Vries, Marc de, with Boersma, Kees. 2005. 80 Years of Research at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (1914-1994): The Role of the Nat.Lab. At Philips. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Burghard. 1999. “Blitze für Kernphysik und Strahlentherapie: Die Stoßspannungsexperimente von Brasch und Lange am Monte Generoso und bei der AEG in Berlin 1925–1935.” Technikgeschichte 66:173–204.Google Scholar
Williams, Rosalind H. 2002. “Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization.” Technology and Culture 43:139–49.Google Scholar
Wittje, Roland. 2016. The Age of Electroacoustics: Transforming Science and Sound. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Yeang, Chen-Pang. 2013. Probing the Sky with Radio Waves: From Wireless Technology to the Development of Atmospheric Science. Chicago: University of Chicago press.Google Scholar