|
Featured Textbook in
Physics is :
Physics in Oxford 1839-1939,
Laboratories, Learning and College Life by
Robert Fox and Graeme Gooday ( editors)
About this book
: |
 |
|
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
idiosyncratic concern 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 vigor in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth |
|
centuries, especially at the 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 broader perspective |
|
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 the largest and
most dynamic schools of physics |
|
in the world. |
| |
|
Buy This Book |
|
See Our
Full
List of Physics Books |
