Physics in Australia to 1945

Physics in Australia to 1945 PDF

Author: Roderick Weir Home

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Guide to the writings of Australian physicists to 1945. Arranged alphabetically by author and includes both separately published and journal contributions. A brief biography is given for each physicist and there is also a detailed subject index.

Australian Science in the Making

Australian Science in the Making PDF

Author: R. W. Home

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-09-28

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9780521396400

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this 1989 volume the Australian Academy of Science celebrates and assesses two centuries of Australian science.

Golden Years of Australian Radio Astronomy

Golden Years of Australian Radio Astronomy PDF

Author: Wayne Orchiston

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-20

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 3319918435

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The evolution of Australian radio astronomy from 1945 to 1960 has been studied in detail by numerous historians of science in recent years. This Open Access book is the first to present an overview of this remarkable chapter in Australian science. The book begins in the post-war period, as the Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney switched from secret wartime research on radar to peacetime applications of this new technology. Next follows the detection of radio waves from space and the ensuing transformation of this fledgling science into the dominant research program at the Radiophysics Lab. Drawing from this history, the book shows how by 1960 the Radiophysics Lab had become the largest and most successful radio astronomy group in the world. The final chapter presents an overview of Australian radio astronomy from 1960 to the present day, as Australia prepares to co-host the multi-national, multi-billion-dollar Square Kilometre Array. Nearly 300 high-quality images complement the text, drawn from a wide range of sources including the extensive collection held by the CSIRO Radio Astronomy Image Archive. The book will be an essential reference for readers interested in the scientific and cultural development of radio astronomy. This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939

Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 PDF

Author: Robert Fox

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-06-16

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0198567928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 offers a challenging new interpretation of pre-war physics at the University of Oxford, which was far more dynamic than most historians and physicists have been prepared to believe. It explains, on the one hand, how attempts to develop the University's Clarendon Laboratory by Robert Clifton, Professor of Experimental Philosophy from 1865 to 1915, were thwarted by academic politics and funding problems, and latterly by Clifton's idiosyncraticconcern with precision instrumentation. Conversely, by examining in detail the work of college fellows and their laboratories, the book reconstructs the decentralized environment that allowed physics to enter on a period of conspicuous vigour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially atthe characteristically Oxonian intersections between physics, physical chemistry, mechanics, and mathematics. Whereas histories of Cambridge physics have tended to focus on the self-sustaining culture of the Cavendish Laboratory, it was Oxford's college-trained physicists who enabled the discipline to flourish in due course in university as well as college facilities, notably under the newly appointed professors, J. S. E. Townsend from 1900 and F. A. Lindemann from 1919. This broaderperspective allows us to understand better the vitality with which physicists in Oxford responded to the demands of wartime research on radar and techniques relevant to atomic weapons and laid the foundations for the dramatic post-war expansion in teaching and research that has endowed Oxford with one of thelargest and most dynamic schools of physics in the world.

Wireless and Empire

Wireless and Empire PDF

Author: Aitor Anduaga

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-02-19

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0191568058

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Although the product of a self-proclaimed consensus politics, the British Empire was always based on communications supremacy and the knowledge of the atmosphere. Using the metaphor of a thread of five pieces representing the categories science, industry, government, the military, and the education, this is the first book to study the relations between wireless and Empire throughout the interwar period. It is also the first to make full use of the abundant archive material and rich sources existing in Britain and the Dominions. The book examines the evolving connection between the development of imperial radio communications and atmospheric physics; the expansion and strength of the British radio industry and its relationship with the elucidation of the ionosphere; and the different extent to which Australia, Canada and New Zealand managed to emulate the British model of radio R&D in the interwar years. The book ends with a highly original and provocative epilogue: 'The realist interpretation of the atmosphere'.

Reader's Guide to the History of Science

Reader's Guide to the History of Science PDF

Author: Arne Hessenbruch

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 965

ISBN-13: 1134262949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Reader's Guide to the History of Science looks at the literature of science in some 550 entries on individuals (Einstein), institutions and disciplines (Mathematics), general themes (Romantic Science) and central concepts (Paradigm and Fact). The history of science is construed widely to include the history of medicine and technology as is reflected in the range of disciplines from which the international team of 200 contributors are drawn.

A Single Sky

A Single Sky PDF

Author: David P.D. Munns

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-10-26

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0262304279

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

How radio astronomers challenged national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and the constraints of vision to create an international scientific community. For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio telescope” offered humanity a new vision of the universe. In A Single Sky, the historian David Munns explains how the idea of the radio telescope emerged from a new scientific community uniting the power of radio with the international aspirations of the discipline of astronomy. The radio astronomers challenged Cold War era rivalries by forging a united scientific community looking at a single sky. Munns tells the interconnecting stories of Australian, British, Dutch, and American radio astronomers, all seeking to learn how to see the universe by means of radio. Jointly, this international array of radio astronomers built a new “community” style of science opposing the “glamour” of nuclear physics. A Single Sky describes a communitarian style of science, a culture of interdisciplinary and international integration and cooperation, and counters the notion that recent science has been driven by competition. Collaboration, or what a prominent radio astronomer called “a blending of radio invention and astronomical insight,” produced a science as revolutionary as Galileo's first observations with a telescope. Working together, the community of radio astronomers revealed the structure of the galaxy.

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19 PDF

Author: Melanie Nolan

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 970

ISBN-13: 1760464139

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and representative Australians. The volume is still in the shadow of World War II with servicemen and women who enlisted young appearing, but these influences are dimming and there are now increasing numbers of non-white, non-male, non-privileged and non-straight subjects. The 680 individuals recorded in volume 19 of the ADB include Wiradjuri midwife and Ngunnawal Elder Violet Bulger; Aboriginal rights activist, poet, playwright and artist Kevin Gilbert; and Torres Strait Islander community leader and land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo. HIV/AIDS child activists Tony Lovegrove and Eve Van Grafhorst have entries, as does conductor Stuart Challender, ‘the first Australian celebrity to go public’ about his HIV/AIDS condition in 1991. The arts are, as always, well-represented, including writers Frank Hardy, Mary Durack and Nene Gare, actors Frank Thring and Leonard Teale and arts patron Ian Potter. We are beginning to see the effects of the steep rise in postwar immigration flow through to the ADB. Artist Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was born in Poland. Pilar Moreno de Otaegui, co-founded the Spanish Club of Sydney. Chinese restaurateur and community leader Ming Poon (Dick) Low migrated to Victoria in 1953. Often we have a dearth of information about the domestic lives of our subjects; politician Olive Zakharov, however, bravely disclosed at the Victorian launch of the federal government’s campaign to Stop Violence Against Women in 1993 that she was a survivor of domestic violence in her second marriage. Take a dip into the many fascinating lives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Empire of scholars

Empire of scholars PDF

Author: Tamson Pietsch

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-05-16

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1784991775

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Now available in paperback, Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics across the colonial world in the age of ‘Victorian’ globalization. Stretching across the globe, these networks helped map the boundaries of an expansive but exclusionary ‘British academic world’ that extended beyond the borders of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, this book remaps the intellectual geographies of Britain and its empire. In doing so, it provides a new context for writing the history of ideas and offers a critical analysis of the connections that helped fashion the global world of universities today.