Description: Life in a puzzling universe
This week, the 4 th international conference on the history of physics finally took place at Trinity College Dublin. The event, supported by the Institute of Physics and the European Physics Society, was the fourth in an o ngoing series of international conferences on the history of physics , a biennial series of meetings that aims to bring together professional historians and physicists with an interest in the history of their subject.
It was a great pleasure to attend this particular conference of the series, as it had been postponed many times due to the Covid virus. Because the meeting was initially expected to take place in 2020, close to the twin centenaries of Rutherford’s discovery of the proton as a fundamental constituent of the atom and the Eddington-Dyson eclipse experiment to measure the bending of light, it was decided that a major theme of the conference would be ‘On the road to modern physics’ .
Thus, there were several great talks on the Eddington expedition by Daniel Kennefick, Ana Simoes and Jerry Gilmore, to name but a few, and a presentation on the discovery of the proton by Nadia Robotti. There were many other interesting talks, from Peter Gallagher’s presentation on astronomy at Birr Castle down through the ages to Michael Jewess’s account of the Einstein-de Haas experiment. Other highlights were a presentation on the cosmology of Alexander Friedmann by Alexamder Kojenikov, marking the cente