The Solvay councils and the birth of modern physics
This falls into two parts: seven articles on physics before 1911 by separate authors; and six chapters on some of the first seven councils/conferences and on related issues, by the editors. There were 12 councils/conferences, and these are listed on p. 214, and there is a list of the participants in the first seven from 1911 to 1933; there were five conferences 1948-1961. This shows the purpose of the book: to provide an account of the birth of modern physics in a political and institutional context, at a time of change, creation, conflict and cooperation in physics. Solvay was born in 1838, developed a low-cost method of making sodium bicarbonate for the textile, soap, glass and steel industries, made a lot of money, was a Belgian patriot who helped his fellow citizens during the occupation of 1914-1918, and died in 1922. His theories about science, politics and human society led him to support a meeting to discuss current questions on radiation and quanta with a select group of physicists and chemists, with prepared papers on specified subjects followed by free discussion. This recipe was successful for the seven conferences before WWII. The councils became places for propaganda by Rutherford, for improvisation under the first chairman Lorentz, for organization under the second chairman Langevin (not so successful), as opportunities for international oppression against Germans and by fascists, for competition with the Nobel Institute (between Nernst and Arrhenius). There are two articles on physics and the organization of physics before 1900: these are flawed by poor dating and wrong facts: Laplace wrote much of the Mécanique célèste before 1796 and it was published 1799 [an VII]--1825 (p. 57); Maupertuis, Clairaut and La Condamine measured the shape of the earth by surveying and astronomy, not by pendulum swings; and it was not that Euler applied differential and integral calculus to mechanics which mattered (Newton, Leibniz and others had already done so), it was that he gave us Newton's laws in the form we now use with second derivatives rather than the hard to understand Leibnizian second differentials (pp. 70-71). The authors fare better on modern physics, and the second part of the book reads easily, with points made well; they provide a concise development of the questions which produced modern physics: radiation and quanta, the structure of matter, atoms and electrons, electrons and photons, magnetism, structure of atomic nuclei. After WWII the conferences slowly died under the massive research-group operations developed during the war, the change in scale for the expense involved, the plethora of specialized conferences: instead of just a dozen or so persons to cover the field in pre-war days, there were now many hundreds of people at the forefront of research. The references are buried in the footnotes.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1253593