No Arabic abstract
On February 16, 1951, at the atomic energy pilot plant on Huemul Island, San Carlos de Bariloche, thermonuclear reactions were carried out under control conditions on a technical scale. This is how Gral. Peron announced, on March 24, 1951, the amazing result of what became known as the Huemul Project. In this article we review that story of misadventures that, despite its extravagant development and announced end, came to mean the beginning of Argentine nuclear development.
New measurement and assessment techniques have been applied to the radiochemical re-evaluation of the Trinity Event. Thirteen trinitite samples were dissolved and analyzed using a combination of traditional decay counting methods and the mass spectrometry techniques. The resulting data were assessed using advanced simulation tools to afford a final yield determination of $24.8 pm 2$ kilotons TNT equivalent, substantially higher than the previous DOE released value of 21 kilotons. This article is intended to complement the work of Susan Hanson and Warren Oldham, seen elsewhere in this issue.
Sicily has played an important role in the development of the new research area named Econophysics. In fact some key ideas supporting this new hybrid discipline were originally formulated in a pioneering work of the Sicilian born physicist Ettore Majorana. The article he wrote was entitled The value of statistical laws in physics and social sciences. I will discuss its origin and history that has been recently discovered in the study of Stefano Roncoroni. This recent study documents the true reasons and motivations that triggered the pioneering work of Majorana. It also shows that the description of this work provided by Edoardo Amaldi was shallow and misleading. In the second part of the talk I will recollect the first years of development of econophysics and in particular the role of the International Workshop on Econophysics and Statistical Finance held in Palermo on 28-30 September 1998 and the setting in 1999 of the Observatory of Complex Systems the research group on Econophysics of Palermo University and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica della Materia.
During the second world war, Canada made several important contributions to the wartime work of the Manhattan Project. The three main contributions were: establishing a domestic nuclear research laboratory in Montreal to investigate heavy water reactors, creating supply chains to provide uranium oxide, heavy water and polonium to the Manhattan Project, and the direct contributions of several Canadians living the United States. These wartime efforts helped establish a legacy of nuclear research in Canada which has persisted to the present day.
Subject of our present paper is the analysis of the origins or historical roots of the Higgs boson research from a bibliometric perspective, using a segmented regression analysis in a reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). Our analysis is based on the references cited in the Higgs boson publications published since 1974. The objective of our analysis consists of identifying concrete individual publications in the Higgs boson research context to which the scientific community frequently had referred to. As a consequence, we are interested in seminal works which contributed to a high extent to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Our results show that researchers in the Higgs boson field preferably refer to more recently published papers - particular papers published since the beginning of the sixties. For example, our analysis reveals seven major contributions which appeared within the sixties: Englert and Brout (1964), Higgs (1964, 2 papers), and Guralnik et al. (1964) on the Higgs mechanism as well as Glashow (1961), Weinberg (1967), and Salam (1968) on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interaction. Even if the Nobel Prize award highlights the outstanding importance of the work of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, bibliometrics offer the additional possibility of getting hints to other publications in this research field (especially to historical publications), which are of vital importance from the expert point of view.
We are experiencing a period of extreme intellectual effervescence in the area of cosmology. A huge volume of observational data in unprecedented quantity and quality and a more consistent theoretical framework propelled cosmology to an era of precision, turning the discipline into a cutting-edge area of contemporary science. Observations with type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia), showed that the expanding Universe is accelerating, an unexplained fact in the traditional decelerated model. Identifying the cause of this acceleration is the most fundamental problem in the area. As in the scientific renaissance, the solution will guide the course of the discipline in the near future and the possible answers (whether dark energy, some extension of general relativity or a still unknown mechanism) should also leverage the development of physics. In this context, without giving up a pedagogical approach, we present an overview of both the main theoretical results and the most significant observational discoveries of cosmology in the last 100 years. The saga of cosmology will be presented in a trilogy. In this article (Part I), based on the articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lema^itre and Hubble, we will describe the period between the origins of cosmology and the discovery of Universal expansion (1929). In Part II, we will see the period from 1930 to 1997, closing with the old standard decelerated model. The Part III will be entirely devoted to the accelerated model of the universe, the cosmic paradigm of the XXI century.