2023-11-14 22:14:47
by VINCENZO BARONE
With the newspaper the series created with Bollati Boringhieri and dedicated to the fathers of modern physics. The first release on November 15th: «Science and common thought» by the famous American theorist
A heroic era, of patient work and reckless ideas, of false starts and brilliant intuitions; a period of creation, which opened up a new horizon, shocking and exhilarating at the same time. Thus Robert Oppenheimer, in Science and common thought – the volume that opens “Biblioteca difisica”, the series on newsstands from 15 November with the “Corriere della Sera” – described the golden age experienced by physics in the first decades of the twentieth century .
Over the course of thirty years, the scientific world was shaken by a revolution that rested on two legs: on the one hand, relativity, which overturned the ideas of space and time; on the other, quantum theory, which undermined the traditional canons of knowledge. The first, to tell the truth, was more in continuity than in rupture with the physics of the past (see The evolution of physics by Einstein and Infeld, and The Einsteinian synthesis by Born). It was the fruit of the incomparable and solitary genius of Albert Einstein, although the independent contribution of another giant, Henri Poincaré, should not be forgotten (see Geometry and Chance). Quantum theory was instead a collective and long-gestating product. Its roots were in an act of true daring by an old-school theoretical physicist, Max Planck, who, in 1900, conceived the idea that energy exchanges between radiation and matter occurred discontinuously, by packets of energy , the “quanta” (see Knowledge of the physical world). The eruption of discontinuity in nature appeared to many as an element of profound disturbance, but, as the initially skeptical Poincaré demonstrated, there was no alternative: the world was really made like this. The next turning point was Einstein’s hypothesis of light quanta (1905), which was followed by the quantum model of atoms developed by Niels Bohr (1913).
But the definitive transition from the old to the new world occurred between 1925 and 1927, and was the work of two physicists so young as to have no awe in their proposals, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, and of two more mature scholars, Erwin Schrödinger and Max Born. The quantum mechanics – properly so called – that arose from their works subverted, as not even Einsteinian relativity had done, the physical vision of the world: probability replaced certainty, indeterminism replaced determinism, and all this, surprisingly, allowed us to understand the fundamental phenomena of matter and to discover new astonishing facts.
The application of quantum mechanics to atomic physics was immediately full of successes and proceeded rapidly, so much so that by the beginning of the 1930s the structure of atoms could be said to be essentially clarified. The research front then shifted to nuclei. Crucial, in this context, was the possibility – demonstrated experimentally by Enrico Fermi and collaborators – of producing, in an artificial form, radioactive nuclei by bombardment with neutrons. Finally, the discovery of nuclear fission (the splitting of uranium into two fragments, with the release of a large quantity of energy, according to the famous Einsteinian formula E = mc²), brought out, as Fermi observed (see Atoms Nuclei Particles), « nuclear physics from the narrow field of pure research, transporting it into that of the “big things””.
In the century that separates us from this wonderful adventure, physics has made giant strides, allowing us to discover aspects of reality that not even the brilliant figures we have mentioned could imagine. But the light that illuminates the path of today’s physicists is still the one lit by the greats of the early twentieth century. In their writings we therefore find living physics, told in the first person – and without sugarcoating – by its protagonists: we will not only read about triumphs, but also about failures; not only of courageous conquests, but also of fatal hesitations.
The founding fathers of modern physics never disdained – not even in the moments of greatest scientific commitment – to disseminate their discoveries, to bring the unprecedented ideas that were emerging to the widest possible audience. Also strong in their solid humanistic education, they considered themselves natural philosophers, heirs of an ancient tradition, in which there was no continuity between science and philosophy (just read, in this regard, Schrödinger’s Image of the World, Thoughts of the Years difficult by Einstein, Physics and beyond and Changes in the foundations of science by Heisenberg). Above all, they were convinced that their work, in addition to changing the face of physics, would have a profound impact on the entire culture and, in the long term, even on common sense. They were right, and their pages are, for us today, a source of priceless pleasure.
Each book for €9.90. Fermi, Heisenberg, Planck: the voice of the protagonists
Seventy years ago, at the end of 1953, the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), who a decade earlier had been put in charge of the Manhattan Project for the creation of the atomic bomb, held a series of conferences, the Reith lectures, on the national English radio and television network, the BBC. From that experience was born Science and common thought: the book, proposed in the translation by Luigi Bianchi and Ludovico Terzi, is on newsstands on Wednesday 15 November with the «Corriere della Sera» and inaugurates the «Biblioteca difisica», a series dedicated to the classics of physics created in collaboration with the publisher Bollati Boringhieri. The volumes, chosen from among the popular texts of the founding fathers of modern physics (from Einstein to Fermi, from Planck to Heisenberg…), will be released weekly, on Wednesdays, and will each be on sale for 9.90 euros plus the normal price of the daily newspaper. We start today with Oppenheimer’s volume, preceded by an introduction by Vincenzo Barone written for the series: it is the text we anticipate above. Born from a need for dissemination, Science and common thought addresses in a simple way the link between the scientist and the layman, highlighting the links between daily experience and scientific concepts and trying to give the reader a guide to understanding the revolution that occurred in the transition between classical physics and atomic theory. A revolution that we access through the speakerphone of one of its protagonists. One of the most famous but also the most discussed, the “father of the atomic bomb” who in the post-war period would become a staunch opponent of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
November 14, 2023 (modified November 14, 2023 | 9.13pm)
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