Very interesting!
World Class physicists are extremely rare on this side of the planet. :( Australia had Mark Oliphant during WW2 and claims Dark Energy discoverer and Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt, even though he was born and raised in USA. I'll give the Kiwis the legendary Ernest Rutherford, though his nationality was officially British.
> Britain in contrast centralized most in "Oxbridge"
Some prominent Oxbridge physicists:
Heisenberg developed Matrix mechanics. Schrödinger developed Wave mechanics. Dirac showed they were equivalent. And predicted antimatter. Dirac was quite a character, excruciatingly awkward in social situations. His Cambridge friends defined a unit called a "dirac", one word per hour. I love the way he criticised J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." :)
> you can meet and "get physical" with Olivia Newton-John in your "backyard"! Just realized her mother was born Born
Max Born was her grandfather. Wow, that's a huge surprise!
Schrödinger hated Matrix mechanics so intensely that he spoiled a romantic getaway inventing Wave mechanics. Matrices are rarely used in Physics, so most working physicists gleefully switched to the Schrödinger wave equation. Though it worked well, nobody knew what was actually waving, how to interpret Psi? Schrödinger tried to interpret its modulus squared as a charge density, but was unsuccessful. When it was later successfully interpreted (by Max Born!) as the probability amplitude, Schrödinger was horrified, saying later "I do not like quantum mechanics, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it". :)
In reply to Re^8: Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science
by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science
by eyepopslikeamosquito
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