Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

This absorbing intellectual history vividly recreates the unique social, political, and philosophical milieu in which the extraordinary promise of Einstein and scientific contemporaries took root and flourished into greatness. Feuer shows us that no scientific breakthrough really happens by chance; it takes a certain intellectual climate, a decisive tension within the very fabric of society, to spur one man's potential genius into world-shaking achievement. Feuer portrays such men of high imaginative powers as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, influenced by and (...) influencing the social worlds in which they lived. (shrink)

Holography exploded on the scientific world in 1964, but its slow fuse had been burning much longer. Over the next four decades, the echoes of that explosion reached scientists, engineers, artists and popular culture. Emerging from classified military research, holography evolved to represent the power of post-war physics, an aesthetic union of art and science, the countercultural meanderings of holism, a cottage industry for waves of would-be entrepreneurs and a fertile plot device for science fiction. New working cultures sprang up (...) to mutate holography, redefining its products, reshaping its audiences and reconceiving its applications. The outcomes included ever more sublime holograms and exquisitely sensitive measuring techniques - but also priority disputes, prurience and poisonous business rivalries. New subjects cross intellectual borders, and so do their explanations. This book draws on the history and philosophy of science and technology, social studies, politics and cultural history to trace the trajectory of holography. The result is an in-depth account of how new science emerges. Based on unprecedented interviews with pioneer holographers and extensive archival research, it reveals how science, technology, art and wider culture are entwined in the modern world. (shrink)