by David Kaiser
17. J. A. Formaggio, D. I. Kaiser, M. M. Murskyj, and T. E. Weiss, “Violation of the Leggett-Garg Inequality in Neutrino Oscillations,” Physical Review Letters 117 (2016): 050402, http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00041.
18. Formaggio et al., “Violation of the Leggett-Garg Inequality in Neutrino Oscillations.”
Chapter 4
A version of this essay originally appeared in New Yorker, 7 February 2017 (online).
1. Albert Einstein to Max Born, 3 March 1947, in The Born-Einstein Letters, 1916–1955, ed. Max Born (1971; New York: Macmillan, 2005), 154–55. See also Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York: Knopf, 2008).
2. Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. My dessert analogy builds on a similar discussion in Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2006), 121.
4. Abraham Pais, “Einstein and the Quantum Theory,” Reviews of Modern Physics 51, no. 4 (December 1979): 863–914, on 907.
5. See esp. Gilder, Age of Entanglement; David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Olival Freire, The Quantum Dissidents: Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Springer, 2014); and Andrew Whitaker, John Stewart Bell and Twentieth-Century Physics: Vision and Integrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
6. See, e.g., Anton Zeilinger, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010).
7. B. Hensen et al., “Loophole-Free Bell Inequality Violation Using Electron Spins Separated by 1.3 Kilometres,” Nature 526 (2015): 682–86, https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05949; M. Giustina et al., “Significant-Loophole-Free Test of Bell’s Theorem with Entangled Photons,” Physical Review Letters 115 (2015): 250401, https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03190; L. K. Shalm et al., “Strong Loophole-Free Test of Local Realism,” Physical Review Letters 115 (2015): 250402, https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03189; W. Rosenfeld et al., “Event-Ready Bell Test Using Entangled Atoms Simultaneously Closing Detection and Locality Loopholes,” Physical Review Letters 119 (2017): 010402, https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04604; and M.-H. Li et al., “Test of Local Realism into the Past without Detection and Locality Loopholes,” Physical Review Letters 121 (2018): 080404, https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07653.
8. Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik” (1935), translated in John Trimmer, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 323–38, on 335.
9. Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics.
10. J. Gallicchio, A. Friedman, and D. Kaiser, “Testing Bell’s Inequality with Cosmic Photons: Closing the Setting-Independence Loophole,” Physical Review Letters 112 (2014): 110405, https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3288.
11. See Zeilinger, Dance of the Photons; and Anton Zeilinger, “Light for the Quantum: Entangled Photons and Their Applications; A Very Personal Perspective,” Physica Scripta 92 (2017): 072501.
12. T. Scheidl et al., “Violation of Local Realism with Freedom of Choice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 19708–13, https://arxiv.org/abs/0811.3129.
13. J. Handsteiner et al., “Cosmic Bell Test: Measurement Settings from Milky Way Stars,” Physical Review Letters 118 (2017): 060401, https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06985.
14. Handsteiner et al., “Cosmic Bell Test.”
15. In each of our experiments, we produced pairs of entangled particles by shining light from a powerful “pump” laser, which had been tuned to emit light of a specific frequency, onto a special piece of material known as a nonlinear crystal. The atomic structure of the crystal is such that when a particle of light (known as a “photon”) with a specific frequency enters the crystal, the crystal absorbs the incoming light and emits pairs of photons, the sum of whose energy is equal to that carried by the incoming photon. For more details on our experimental setup, see the “supplemental material” available with Handsteiner et al., “Cosmic Bell Test,” and with Dominik Rauch et al., “Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars,” Physical Review Letters 121 (2018): 080403, https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05966.
16. Rauch et al., “Cosmic Bell Test.”
Chapter 5
Portions of this essay originally appeared in Nature 523 (July 2015): 523–25.
1. See, e.g., Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson Jr., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 1, The New World, 1939–46 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962); Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Henry Guerlac, Radar in World War II (1947; New York: American Institute of Physics, 1987).
2. Lincoln Barnett, “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Life, 10 October 1949, 120–38, on 121.
3. Joseph Jones, “Can Atomic Energy Be Controlled?,” Harper’s, May 1946, 425–30, on 425 (“dinner party”); and Samuel K. Allison, “The State of Physics, or The Perils of Being Important,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (January 1950): 2–4, 26–27, on 2–3 (“besieged with requests,” “exhibited as lions”).
4. On travel to the Shelter Island meeting, see Silvan S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 172–74. On physicists’ B-25 flights, see Philip Morse, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 247. On correspondence from nonphysicists, see the thick folders of letters in University of California–Berkeley, Department of Physics records, 3:19–21, collection number CU-68, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley; and in Samuel King Allison Papers, 33:3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, IL. On the Gallup poll, see Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1978), 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 391.
5. James B. Conant, “Chemists and the National Defense,” News Edition of the American Chemical Society 19 (25 November 1941): 1237.
6. On Conant, see esp. James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993).
7. See David Kaiser, “Shut Up and Calculate!,” Nature 505 (9 January 2014): 153–55. See also Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Lillian Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. Henry A. Barton, “A Physicist’s War,” Bulletin 1 (12 January 1942), in box 11, folder 16, Henry A. Barton Papers, collection number AR20, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD.
9. R. J. Havighurst and K. Lark-Horovitz, “The Schools in a Physicist’s War,” American Journal of Physics 11 (April 1943): 103–8, on 103–4 (“New courses in biology”); and Charles K. Morse, “High School Physics and War,” American Journal of Physics 10 (December 1942): 333–34 (“It is now”).
10. Thomas D. Cope et al., “Readjustments of Physics Teaching to the Needs of Wartime,” American Journal of Physics 10 (October 1942): 266–68.
11. V. R. Cardozier, Colleges and Universities in World War II (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 43, 71, 109–11; Donald deB. Beaver and Renee Dumouchel, eds., A History of Science at Williams (1995), 2nd ed. (2000), chap. 3, sec. 3, http://www.williams.edu/go/sciencecenter/center/histscipub.html; Karl T. Compton, 1944–45 Annual Report, in MIT-AR; and John Burchard, Q.E.D.: M.I.T. in World War II (New York: Wiley, 1948), chap. 19. See also Deborah Douglas, “MIT and War,” in Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 81–102.
12. Henry A. Barton, “A Physicist’s War,” Bulletin 13 (8
March 1943), in Barton Papers.
13. B. E. Warren, 1942–43 Annual Report, in MIT-AR; unsigned Princeton report from August 1945 in PDP box 1, folder “Report for War Service Bureau”; and Beaver and Dumouchel, History of Science at Williams, chap. 3, sec. 3.
14. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Smon and Schuster, 1986).
15. Rebecca Press Schwartz, “The Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb: The Smyth Report and the Historiography of the Manhattan Project” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008).
16. Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). See also Schwartz, “Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb.”
17. Schwartz, “Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb,” 67. See also David Kaiser, “The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War,” Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 28–60.
18. Schwartz, “Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb”; and Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 7.
19. War Department press release, “State of Washington Site of Community Created by Project” (6 August 1945), in Manhattan Project: Official History and Documents, ed. Paul Kesaris, 12 microfilm reels (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1977), reel 1, pt. 6.
20. Schwarz, “Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb,” chap. 3.
21. US Senate, Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Essential Information on Atomic Energy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946).
22. Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?” See also Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
23. Hewlett and Anderson, History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1:633–34.
24. Emanuel Piore (director of the Physical Sciences Division of the Office of Naval Research), as quoted in Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 106. See also Emanuel Piore, “Investment in Basic Research,” Physics Today 1 (November 1948): 6–9.
25. Senator B. B. Hickenlooper to David E. Lilienthal, 30 July 1948, reprinted in Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, Eighty-First Congress, First Session, on Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship Program, May 16, 17, 18, and 23, 1949 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), on 5; Lilienthal’s testimony appears on 4. On 1953 Atomic Energy Commission employment statistics, see John Heilbron, “An Historian’s Interest in Particle Physics,” in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s, ed. Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47–54, on 51.
26. Paul Forman, “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 (1987): 149–229.
27. On growth rates for PhD conferrals across fields, see David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (Fall 2002): 131–59. On broader impacts of the G.I. Bill and shifts within American higher education, see also Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
28. R. C. Gibbs (chair, National Research Council Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences) to A. G. Shenstone (Princeton physics department chair), 7 August 1950, in PDP box 2, folder “Scientific manpower” (“procedures for utilizing our manpower”); R. C. Gibbs and H. A. Barton, “Proposed Policy Recommendation,” three-page memorandum dated 1 August 1950, in the same folder (“very short emergency,” “stockpile”); “Supplementary Memorandum for Prospective Graduate Students,” mimeographed notice circulated by the University of Rochester physics department (n.d., ca. winter 1951), a copy of which may be found in PDP box 2, folder “Scientific manpower.” See also Raymond Birge to R. C. Gibbs, 10 August 1950, in RTB.
29. Henry DeWolf Smyth, “The Stockpiling and Rationing of Scientific Manpower,” Physics Today 4 (February 1951), 18–24, on 19; and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report as quoted in Henry Barton, “AIP 1952 Annual Report,” Physics Today 6 (May 1952): 4–9, on 6. See also George Harrison, “Testimony on Manpower,” Physics Today 4 (March 1951): 6–7. On the growth rates of training physicists around the world, see also Catherine Ailes and Francis Rushing, The Science Race: Training and Utilization of Scientists and Engineers, US and USSR (New York: Crane Russak, 1982); and Burton R. Clark, ed., The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
30. Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions.”
Chapter 6
A version of this essay originally appeared in London Review of Books 34 (27 September 2012): 17–18.
1. The report, entitled “On the Transmission of Gamma Rays through Shields,” and the accompanying table of integrals, both dated 24 June 1947, are available in HAB box 3, folder 15.
2. On Bethe’s early training and career, see Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Silvan S. Schweber, Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On Bethe’s consulting for the nuclear industry after the war, see esp. Benjamin Wilson, “Hans Bethe, Nuclear Model,” in Strange Stability: Models of Compromise in the Age of Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). My thanks to Wilson for sharing a draft of his chapter prior to publication.
3. Lorraine Daston, “Enlightenment Calculations,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1993): 182–202.
4. David Bierens de Haan, Nouvelles tables d’intégrales définies (Leiden: P. Engels, 1867).
5. Bush quoted in David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 84. On the founding of the Institute, see 83–87.
6. Freeman Dyson reported Bethe’s advice (“not to expect”) in Dyson to his parents, 2 June 1948, quoted in Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart, 86.
7. George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2012). See also Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 8. Most biographical details about John von Neumann presented here come from Dyson’s book.
8. David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Richard Feynman, “Los Alamos from Below,” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 90–118; Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455–83; and Matthew Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
9. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, chaps. 10–11.
10. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, chap. 10. See also Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), chap. 1.
11. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 298.
12. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. Morse, as quoted in Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 333.
14. Albert Einstein to Henry Allen Moe, 28 November 1954, as quoted in David Kaiser, “Bringing the Human Actors Back on Stage: The Personal Context of the Einstein-Boh
r Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 129–52, on 146.
15. See, e.g., Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing; and Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
Chapter 7
Versions of this essay originally appeared in Social Research 73, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 1225–52; and in Osiris 27 (2012): 276–302. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
1. Benjamin Fine, “Russia Is Overtaking U.S. in Training of Technicians,” New York Times, 7 November 1954, 1, 80; and “Red Technical Graduates Are Double Those in U.S.,” Washington Post, 14 November 1955, 21.
2. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xvii (“a situation”), 81 (“As prices continue to rise”). See also Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), chap. 7.
