Showing papers by "Helge Kragh published in 2022"

Chemists Without Knowing It?

Abstract: This paper considers aspects of the chemistry-physics relationship from a historical perspective and with a focus on the entrance of quantum mechanics in twentieth-century chemistry. Traditionally, theoretical physics was widely regarded as epistemically superior to chemistry if also, from the chemists’ point of view, of little practical relevance. With the emergence of quantum chemistry in about 1930, the gulf widened as it seemed that the new discipline was more physics than chemistry. One way of investigating theoretically many-electron atoms was by means of the Hartree-Fock approximation method. The Møller-Plesset perturbation theory introduced in 1934 by a Danish and an American physicist was a refinement to the Hartree-Fock method. Although the Møller-Plesset theory was initially neglected – and is still neglected in the historiography of quantum chemistry – it came to play a most important role in later studies. Indeed, it is a prime example of what in sociological studies of science is known as a “sleeping beauty.” The paper discusses the historical context of the Møller-Plesset theory, concluding that, in a sense, its originators were “chemists without knowing it.”

Before Bethe: Early Ideas of the Sun's Generation of Energy

Abstract: : Solar energy remained an enigma for nearly a century. For a while astronomers and physicists believed that the source of the Sun’s energy was gravitational contraction, but the theory turned out to be untenable. Inspired by the new science of radioactivity, by the early twentieth century they increasingly focused on subatomic processes. The paper outlines the attempts to solve the solar energy problem in the period from about 1905 to 1938, which in the later phase involved nuclear astrophysics, a new and exciting interdisciplinary science. Although the problem was only satisfactorily solved with Hans Bethe’s theory of the late 1930s, the earlier attempts involving scientists such as Arthur Eddington, Robert Atkinson and George Gamow can be considered a slow preparation for Bethe’s breakthrough.

Biographical Histories of Chemistry

Abstract: As Mary Jo Nye noted in an essay in the first issue of Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, the genre of biography maintains a great appeal among general readers, working chemists, and scholars of the academic community. The two books under review belong to this broad and increasingly popular genre of biography of chemists and they are both published by the Springer company. However, otherwise they are quite different and for this reason they will be dealt with separately. Some Forgotten Chemists is a slim volume sold by Springer at an unreasonably high price as part of the series Perspectives on the History of Chemistry, edited by Seth Rasmussen. It consists of seventeen chapters, sixteen of which describe the life and career of a chemist who is claimed to be forgotten or is little known today (one of the chapters is a summary account of “Women Pioneers” in general). The author is Brian Halton, a British-New Zealand chemist who, from 1968 to his death in 2019, worked at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he wrote a series of articles on little-remembered yet significant chemists in the local journal Chemistry in New Zealand. These biographical articles have now been collected into a book format. Somewhat unimaginatively, they appear in alphabetical order, starting with Carl Friedrich Accum and ending with William John Young. In this way each chapter is self-contained, much like in biographical dictionaries such as the authoritative multi-volumeDictionary of Scientific Biography or, to mention a less ambitious example from the history of chemistry, the Lexikon bedeutender Chemiker published in 1989. The obvious disadvantage of this kind of fragmented structure is that the book loses coherence and a common context. It is not possible to compare the separate chapters, nor is that the purpose of dictionary-like publications of this type.

Chemists without knowing it? Computational chemistry and the Møller-Plesset pertubation theory

Abstract: . This paper considers aspects of the chemistry-physics relationship from a historical perspective and with a focus on the entrance of quantum mechanics in twen-tieth-century chemistry. Traditionally, theoretical physics was widely regarded as epis-temically superior to chemistry if also, from the chemists’ point of view, of little practical relevance. With the emergence of quantum chemistry in about 1930, the gulf wid-ened as it seemed that the new discipline was more physics than chemistry. One way of investigating theoretically many-electron atoms was by means of the Hartree-Fock approximation method. The Møller-Plesset perturbation theory introduced in 1934 by a Danish and an American physicist was a refinement to the Hartree-Fock method. Although the Møller-Plesset theory was initially neglected – and is still neglected in the historiography of quantum chemistry – it came to play a most important role in later studies. Indeed, it is a prime example of what in sociological studies of science is known as a “sleeping beauty.” The paper discusses the historical context of the Møller-Plesset theory, concluding that, in a sense, its originators were “chemists without knowing it.”

Benjamin Mottelson (1926–2022)

Abstract: Physicist and Nobel prizewinner who revolutionized understanding of the atomic nucleus. Physicist and Nobel prizewinner who revolutionized understanding of the atomic nucleus.