Nagaoka hantaro biography of abraham

The model of Niels Bohr (1885–1962) for the atom is since long just the one and only conception for atoms of the vast majority of educated people. The picture of ► electrons revolving round a nucleus on select avenues has become the icon of the atomic age. In stark contrast to this omnipresence, historically, the Bohr atom may be identified as the best available theory for the atom only for a period of roughly ten years between 1914 and 1924. For this reason any consideration of Bohr's atom has to take into account both the historical context of its creation and the long and diverse processes of reception within science, education and public that gave rise to much misinterpretation of Bohr's intentions, his actual work and its physical or realistic interpretation.

For the question of the genesis of the Bohr model one has to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became widely recognized that both atoms contain electrons and at the same time were almost fully penetrable by electron bombardment. Between 1901 and 1905 various physicists and science popularizers draw the analogy between atoms and planetary systems (e.g. Jean Perrin (1870–1942), Wilhelm Meyer (1853–1910), or Hantaro Nagaoka (1856–1950) ► atomic models) and some of them imm

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A History of Nobel Physicists from Wartime Japan

Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the December 1998 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes and Scientific American.

“The last seminar, given at a gorgeous house left unburned near Riken, was dedicated to [electron] shower theories.... It was difficult to continue the seminars, because Minakawa’s house was burnt in April and the laboratory was badly destroyed in May. The laboratory moved to a village near Komoro in July; four physics students including myself lived there. Tatuoki Miyazima also moved to the same village, and we continued our studies there towards the end of 1945.”—Satio Hayakawa, astrophysicist

Between 1935 and 1955 a handful of Japanese men turned their minds to the unsolved problems of theoretical physics. They taught themselves quantum mechanics, constructed the quantum theory of electromagnetism and postulated the existence of new particles. Much of the time their lives were in turmoil, their homes demolished and their bellies empty. But the worst of times for the scientists was the best of times for the science. After the war, as a numbed Japan surveyed the devastation, its physicists brought home two Nobel