Intermezzo: Effects of Increasing Reynolds Number

Effects of increasing fluid speed are analyzed. The Bernouilli and vorticity equations are derived, and the method of matching solutions is described for the Rankine vortex. Cases in which rotational flow is mandatory are explained, and bifurcations, hydraulic jumps, and transitions between stable and unstable behaviors are introduced. The ethical views of Hans Bethe and Edward Teller are contrasted. Other topics include potential flow around both cylinders and spheres and lessons that can be learnt about flow over a wavy streambed.

Exiles and Immigrants

In the fall of 1933, English physiologist A.V. Hill forcibly denounced the brutal Nazi racial policies, which the Nazi anti-Semite Johannes Stark then defended. Rutherford was drawn into the dispute in early 1934 and responded by first reviewing the long history of racial tolerance and academic freedom in England, and then by appealing for support for the Academic Assistance Council to help refugees. Among them were nuclear physicists Rudolf Peierls, Otto Robert Frisch, Maurice and Gertrude Goldhaber, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Walter Elsasser, who like many before him never forgot the first time he saw the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, knowing that he had been given the chance for a new start in life.

Richard Feynman: The Consensual Sublime

Richard Feynman was a fox, not a hedgehog: he did not know one big thing; instead, he knew many things. He was an inspired tinkerer, a Thomas Edison of theoretical science. Still, like Leo Tolstoy, he yearned to be a hedgehog. Feynman’s vision was like Tolstoy’s: “scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of the fox bitterly intent on seeing in the manner of the hedgehog.” This difference extends to method and attitude. While the great physicist Hans Bethe, Feynman’s frequent working companion at Los Alamos, proceeded deliberately in any argument between them, Feynman “was as likely to begin in the middle or at the end, and jump back and forth until he had convinced himself he was right (or wrong).” It was a contest between “the Battleship and the Mosquito Boat,” a small, lightly armed torpedo vessel. From 1948 to 1958, Feynman enjoyed triumph after triumph. To a former student, Koichi Mano, Feynman wrote: “You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.” Working on these problems, Feynman reflects a general conviction typical of successful scientists. Another scientist says what Richard Feynman might have: “There’s nothing I’d rather do. In fact my boy says I am paid for playing. He’s right. In other words if I had an income I’d do just what I’m doing now. I’m one of the people who has found what he wanted to do. At night when you can’t sleep you think about your problems. You work on holidays and Sundays. It’s fun. Research is fun. By and large it’s a very pleasant existence.” Problems close to the gods are their gift, but the gods are capricious. This is why for many geniuses, being a genius is a career as brief as an athlete’s. For most, as for Feynman, a dreaded day arrives: the great insights stop coming. The marvelous decade having passed, Feynman tells his student Mano that he turned to “innumerable problems you would call humble.”

The laureate as celebrity genius: How Scientific American’s John Horgan profiled Nobel Prize winners

When scientists become Nobel laureates, they become famous in science and public life, but few studies have examined the nature of their scientific celebrity. This article examines how Scientific American portrayed laureates in order to identify and explain core features of Nobel fame. It examines the portrayals of seven laureates – Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Hans Bethe, Murray Gell-Mann, Brian Josephson, Philip Anderson and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar – in magazine profiles written between 1992 and 1995 by science writer John Horgan. Its textual analysis finds the scientists are portrayed as combining the sociological characteristics of genius, including enormous productivity and lasting impact, with the representational characteristics of celebrities, such as the merging of public and private lives. Their form of scientific celebrity is grounded in their field-changing research, which is presented as a product of their idiosyncratic personalities. Nobel science is presented as knowledge created by an ultra-elite of exceptional individuals.