The public controversy over possible health hazards from radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing began in 1954, shortly after a thermonuclear test by the United States spread fallout world wide. In the dissertation, I address two of the fundamental questions of the fallout controversy: Was there a threshold of radiation...
John Archibald Wheeler (09 July 1911- ) is a familiar name to physicists and historians of physics alike. Among his many contributions to the corpus of knowledge, in 1939 John Wheeler and Niels Bohr co-authored the first paper on the generalized mechanism of nuclear fission. Beyond that seminal work, Wheeler...
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in the discovery of the tau lepton by physicist Martin Perl between 1973-
1977. Perl became interested in searching for heavy leptons through positron-electron
collision experiments using the...
This thesis explores the role of Quaker women in science in an attempt to arrive at some understanding of what motivated Quaker women in nineteenth century America to go into the sciences. George Fox founded the Society of Friends in the mid-seventeenth century in England and the Quaker theology centered...
In 1959 the British Ornithological journal, The Ibis, published a centenary commemorative volume on the history of ornithology in Britain. Over the previous few decades, the contributors to this volume had helped focus the attention of ornithologists on the methods, priorities, and problems of modem biology, specifically the theory ofevolution...
The scientific endeavors that took place at Hanford Engineer Works, beginning in World War II and continuing thereafter, are often overlooked in the literature on the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, and in regional histories. To historians of science, Hanford is described as an industrial facility that illustrates the...
In an initial research proposal of December 1969, the scientists of the Coniferous Forest Biome (CFB), an ecosystem study centered in the Pacific Northwest and part of the larger International Biological Programme (IBP), expressed optimism that computer simulations and systems modeling could transform empirical knowledge of the carbon, water, and...