Physics and Our World

Reissue of the Proceedings of a Symposium in Honor of Victor F Weisskopf

As the proceedings of a symposium in honor of Victor Weisskopf at MIT, this volume contains papers by leaders of physics at the time, including M Delbrück, M Gell-Mann, H Bethe, T D Lee, B R Mottelson, W K H Panofsky, E Purcell, J Schwinger, S M Ulam, and others. Some papers address problems in the philosophy of physics, and physics and society, that are timeless in nature. But the symposium had a historical significance, in that it took place at a historic juncture of particle physics — the emergence of the Standard Model owing to experiments that point to the existence of quarks. Some of the papers reflect both the pre-quark and post-quark points of view. For these reasons, these proceedings merit reissue and reexamination.

Contents:

• Introductory Remarks (James Killian)
• The Energy Problem (Hans Bethe)
• Model-Free Views of Deep Inelastic Scattering (Julian Schwinger)
• Life at Low Reynolds Number (E M Purcell)
• A Possible New Form of Matter at High Density (T D Lee)
• The World as Quarks, Leptons and Bosons (Murray Gell-Mann)
• What Angular Momentum Can Do to the Nucleus (Ben R Mottelson)
• Physics for Mathematicians (S M Ulam)
• How Aristotle Discovered DNA (Max Delbrück)
• Is Negotiated Arms Control Possible? (W K H Panofsky)
• The Third Culture (David Hawkins)

Readership: Academics, graduate students and people interested in particle and nuclear physics.