摘要:

Curiously ignorant and apathetic is the manner in which modern workers in many university, government, and industrial research laboratories approach the dangers of handling mercury. Fortunately, most laboratory‐scale operations are intermittent enough to give a distinct factor of safety, but mercury's great toxicity, and the ease with which it gains entry to the body, means that interrupted exposures will not necessarily prevent toxic effects. The possibility of acute mercury poisoning from laboratory accidents and the likelihood of storing unknown amounts of mercury over the years, with resultant chronic poisoning, are very real. Mercury poisoning, or mercurialism, has been known since Roman times. This does not make it less dangerous now.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066320

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

Many writers have noted that pragmatism is the chief trait of the American character, whether this is to be attributed to the cast of mind common in emigrants to the New World, or to the conditions of life that they found and developed there. And just as pragmatism has been the dominating philosophy taught in the universities, so in pedagogy has everything been subordinated to immediate and practical ends. In America, the battle for the inclusion of science in the curriculum was easily won. Money for laboratories has been generously provided—it has always been more readily available for buildings than for the men who teach in them—and the visible successes of modern science have given it enormous prestige as an academic subject. So greatly envied is the position of the scientist in the universities that his colleagues in other departments are tempted to describe their own subjects as sciences and themselves as scientists. Thus a historian who emigrates to America may find that he has become asocial scientist, and in a recent book a psychologist goes so far as to say, “Scientists study and write about people and the world in which they live”—a definition which seems to include all possible topics.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066293

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

There has been some concern that we are approaching a period in which too many physicists may be produced for the work on hand. Careful surveys made in related fields of engineering on the supply and demand for graduating students have indicated a situation in which the current numbers of engineering graduates equal or exceed the anticipated requirements. Will the same be true of physicists in training?

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066295

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

A new series of microscope objectives has been studied with which the microscopist may make visual observations and take ultraviolet photographs without altering the focal setting of his instrument.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066301

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

The Winter meeting of the American Society of X‐Ray and Electron Diffraction was wrongly listed in previous Calendars as taking place in December in Columbus, Ohio. The correct dates are November 30th through December 3rd, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as listed above.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066304

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

The same force that drives the great majority of the rotating shafts of industry (and makes possible the communication which prevents our industrial civilization from breaking down under its own complexity) is used as a probe for investigating the minutiae of atoms and nuclei. So fundamental to existence itself is magnetism that the extent to which we can use this force has far outdistanced our understanding of its nature; in taking the measure of magnetism, scientists must range over many worlds.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066305

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

Couple the rapid increase in the volume of research published annually since 1945 to the sharp rise in the cost of printing, and it is evident that the economies in paper stock and format recently effected in physics journals merely lessen the gap between expense and income. These measures hold no promise of closing it.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066306

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

About two hundred physicists, of whom twenty‐five or so had traveled from Europe, attended the International Conference on the Physics of Very Low Temperatures held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on September 6–10, 1949. Similar meetings had been organized before the last war but only as supplements to the meetings of the International Institute of Refrigeration which were concerned with industrial questions. The transfer to the auspices of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics marks the coming of age of low temperature research as a major branch of physics.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066307

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

We may in time find industry performing a function hitherto associated entirely with scientific societies and universities, if it follows the lead of the Sylvania Electric Products, Inc. which recently sponsored a symposium on the physics of powder metallurgy at Fort Totten in Bayside, Long Island. Walter E. Kingston, manager of Sylvania's Metallurgical Research Laboratories, was the moving spirit of the meeting, which was organized and financially supported by his company independently of any technical society. Kingston assembled a program of twenty‐two papers and approximately one hundred and fifty physicists and metallurgists attended.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066309

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP

摘要:

According to a recent statement by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, only five percent of the more than two thousand papers declassified by the AEC deal with subjects of industrial technology. The reason given for this is that in the past the impetus for declassification and general distribution of atomic energy information has come much more strongly from the scientific than from the engineering and technical groups.

ISSN:0031-9228    

DOI:10.1063/1.3066310

出版商:AIP    

年代:1949

数据来源: AIP