Investigation of the origin and function of three magnets from I. I. Rabi's laboratory at Columbia University leads to a closer inquiry into the early history of molecular beam evaluations of the angular momenta and magnetic moments of atomic nuclei than has been undertaken heretofore. The resulting insights into the background and the course of Rabi's research programme would probably not have occurred without the orientation enforced by these artifacts.

A revised and enlarged version of Biologen unter Hitler, translated by Thomas Dunlap.

Together these essays constitute a comprehensive critique of Israeli society and politics and a probing diagnosis of the malaise that afflicts contemporary ...

In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him. Under the influence of Max Weber the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an offspring of the Protestant revolution, with its asceticism and sense of guilt acting as causative agents in the rise of capitalism and the growth of the scientific movement. Feuer takes strong issue with (...) this view, pointing out how it is at odds with what we know of the psychological conditions of modern societies making for human curiosity and its expression in the observation of and experiment with nature. (shrink)

By scientiometrically analyzing the physics-literature produced between 1925 and 1933 it is shown that the purely quantitative contribution of physicists subsequently emigrating from Germany to the literature produced by the physics community in this country was much lower than hitherto estimated. The actual figure is not in the range of 30%, as is generally assumed, but much nearer to 11%. Control analysis of three leading German physics journals and of memberships in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft confirms this result. Further investigation (...) of university calendars shows that transferring these results to purely academic physics would amount to committing a “universalistic fallacy”. In academic physics emigré-physicists held a total of 15,5% of all teaching postitions.Differentiating the physics literature into various specialties allows further insights into the cognitive and social structure of the German physics community before 1933. Works of emigré-physicists are not randomly distributed over specialities; instead, the distribution reveals a nearly perfect correlation with what could be called “the specialty's paradigmatic age”. The spectrum begins with quantum theory, where future emigrants produced more than 25% of the literature, and fades away with acoustics, where their contribution amounts to less than 4%. The commonly accepted explanation of this phenomenon, which is based on the assumption that time of institutionalization of a specialty, “prestige” of that specialty, and entrance barriers for Jewish scientists are correlated, is falsified by two cases of non- or zero-correlation: by the very old specialties and by the technical disciplines. A new explanans is proposed which is based on the hypothesis of cognitive and social marginality being correlated and on a certain amount of cognitive marginality enhancing the disposition to innovative behavior and creativity. (shrink)