Turbulence is a research field where high expectations have met with recurrent frustration. It is a common perception among physicists, mathematicians and engineers that there is a "big mystery" behind the phenomenon of turbulence. Its history has also remained anything but well researched. Unlike topics such as quantum theory, which began to attract physics historians as long as fifty years ago, turbulence has - until now - received only little professional historical investigation.

This book traces the history of Arnold Sommerfeld’s famous “nursery of theoretical physics” at the University of Munich and demonstrates the centrality of developing personal and institutional networks for the emergence of quantum theory. Sommerfeld, originally a mathematician with little interest in theoretical physics, was a somewhat unlikely choice for a chair of theoretical physics when he was appointed in 1906. However, he quickly reoriented his research focus towards physics, forster...

On the road toward a history of turbulence, this book focuses on what the actors in this research field have identified as the “turbulence problem”. Turbulent flow rose to prominence as one of the most persistent challenges in science. At different times and in different social and disciplinary settings, the nature of this problem has changed in response to changing research agendas.This book does not seek to provide a comprehensive account, but instead an exemplary exposition on t...

This is a comprehensive biography of Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953), the father of modern aerodynamics. His name is associated most famously with the boundary layer concept, but also with several other topics in 20th century fluid mechanics, particularly turbulence (Prandtl's mixing length). Among his disciples are pioneers of modern fluid mechanics such as Heinrich Blasius, Theodore von Kármán and Walter Tollmien. Furthermore, Prandtl founded the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) and the K...

The subject of the book is a biography of the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Although Sommerfeld is famous as a quantum theorist for the elaboration of the semi-classical atomic theory (Bohr-Sommerfeld model, Sommerfeld's fine-structure constant), his role in the history of modern physics is not confined to atoms and quanta.Sommerfeld left his mark in the history of mathematics, fluid mechanics, a number of physical subdisciplines and, in particular, as founder...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...

**TONY AWARD WINNER • An explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.“Endlessly fascinating…. The most invigorating and ingenious play of ideas in many a year…. An electrifying work of art.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times**In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a clandestine trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart and friend Niels Bohr. Their work together on quantum mechan...

In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected–a phenomenon which he derisively described as “spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation “entanglement.” Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist Jo...

"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers." —New ScientistIs there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers—including 137, which describes th...

The gripping, entertaining, and vividly-told narrative of a radical discovery that sent shockwaves through the scientific community and forever changed the way we understand the world.Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” challenged centuries of scientific understanding, placed him in direct opposition to Albert Einstein, and put Niels Bohr in the middle of one of the most heated debates in scientific history. Heisenberg’s theorem stated that there were physi...

Erwin Schr�dinger was an Austrian physicist famous for his contribution to quantum physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1933 and is best known for his thought experiment of a cat in a box, both alive and dead at the same time, which revealed the seemingly paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics.Schr�dinger was working at one of the most fertile and creative moments in the whole history of science. By the time he started university in 1906, Einstein had already published his revolutio...

The untold story of Albert Einstein's role as the father of quantum theoryEinstein and the Quantum reveals for the first time the full significance of Albert Einstein's contributions to quantum theory. Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics, observing that God does not play dice. But, in fact, he thought more about the nature of atoms, molecules, and the emission and absorption of light—the core of what we now know as quantum theory—than he did about...