Editor’s Note: Professor WERNER HEISENBERG, who was born in Duisburg in 1901, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 for his work on the quantum theory. A member of the faculty of the ...

THE experimental study of atomic spectra has a long and distinguished history. Even the descriptive analysis of spectra in terms of series and term values the systematic botany of spectra has a ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Editor’s Note: Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. Driven into exile by Hitler’s advent to power, Professor Einstein came to this ...

Editor’s note: This essay is paired with a second essay that offers a contrasting perspective about J. Robert Oppenheimer. On August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb exploded above the city of ...

In December 1938, two German chemists working on the ground floor of a grand research institute in suburban Berlin accidentally ushered the nuclear era into existence. The chemists, Otto Hahn and ...

Not the least of the questions confronting the scientists and public leaders who must cope with the problem of the atomic bomb is, What is the public frame of mind? For better or for worse, the bomb ...

Seventy-five years ago in summer 1945, the United States' plans for unleashing its atomic bombs went beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Focusing his gaze on Japan, Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the ...