| In the 1920's and 30's, American physicists traveled abroad to work and study in the physics institutes of Europe. Their migration coincided with that of America's literary expatriates and, like them, physicists went to Europe in the 20's in search of their own modernist tenet--quantum theory. The Americans began as outsiders to a coterie of European physicists, yet what they learned abroad about physics, about themselves, and about the culture of a European scientific tradition not only affected their own lives as physicists but also helped transform academic physics in the United States by the early 30's. One of their destinations was Copenhagen where, initially, they participated in the periphery of Niels Bohr's scientific circle at the Institute of Theoretical Physics. By the late 30's, however, not only were America's theorists collaborating with Niels Bohr, its experimentalists were exporting accelerator technology to Denmark. This is a study of American physicists Frank Hoyt, Robert Bruce Lindsay, Harold Urey, John Van Vleck, John C. Slater, Ralph de Laurer Kronig, Jane Dewey Clar, David Dennison, Linus Pauling, I. I. Rabi, Milton Plesset, John A. Wheeler, L. Jackson Laslett, and Thomas Lauritsen in Copenhagen, and of the changing relationship between Niels Bohr and America's physicists in the two decades before World War II. In the context of a maturing physics community in the United States, it is also an account of an early chapter in the lives of America's first generation of modern atomic physicists, and of how their education abroad helped redefine America's position in international physics. |
