David Hawkins (philosopher)
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David Hawkins (philosopher)
David Hawkins (February 28, 1913 – February 24, 2002) was a professor whose interests included the philosophy of science, mathematics, economics, childhood science education, and ethics. He was also an administrative assistant at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory and later one of its official historians. Together with Herbert A. Simon, he discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem. Early life David Hawkins was born in El Paso, Texas, the youngest of seven children of William Ashton Hawkins, and his wife Clara ' Gardiner. His father was a prominent lawyer noted for his work on water law, who worked for the El Paso and Northeastern Railway, and was one of the founders of the city of Alamogordo, New Mexico. He grew up in La Luz, New Mexico. Hawkins attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, but left after his junior year to enter Stanford University. He initially studied chemistry, but then switched to physics before finally majoring in philosophy. ...
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El Paso, Texas
El Paso (; "the pass") is a city in and the county seat, seat of El Paso County, Texas, El Paso County in the western corner of the U.S. state of Texas. The 2020 population of the city from the United States Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau was 678,815, making it the List of United States cities by population, 23rd-largest city in the U.S., the List of cities in Texas by population, sixth-largest city in Texas, and the second-largest city in the Southwestern United States behind Phoenix, Arizona. The city is also List of U.S. cities with large Hispanic populations, the second-largest majority-Hispanic city in the U.S., with 81% of its population being Hispanic. Its metropolitan statistical area covers all of El Paso and Hudspeth County, Texas, Hudspeth counties in Texas, and had a population of 868,859 in 2020. El Paso has consistently been ranked as one of the safest large cities in America. El Paso stands on the Rio Grande across the Mexico–United States border from Ciuda ...
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Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist. A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project—the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer was among those who observed the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945. He later remarked that the explosion brought to mind words from the ''Bhagavad Gita'': "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Oppenheimer became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear ...
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Stan Frankel
Stanley Phillips Frankel (1919 – May, 1978) was an American computer scientist. He worked in the Manhattan Project and developed various computers as a consultant. Early life He was born in Los Angeles, attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and began his career as a post-doc student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at University of California, Berkeley in 1942. Career Frankel helped develop computational techniques used in the nuclear research taking place at the time, notably making some of the early calculations relating to the diffusion of neutrons in a critical assembly of uranium with Eldred Nelson. He joined the T (Theoretical) Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1943. His wife Mary Frankel was also hired to work as a human computer in the T Division. While at Los Alamos, Frankel and Nelson organized a group of scientists' wives, including Mary, to perform som ...
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Nuclear Chain Reaction
In nuclear physics, a nuclear chain reaction occurs when one single nuclear reaction causes an average of one or more subsequent nuclear reactions, thus leading to the possibility of a self-propagating series of these reactions. The specific nuclear reaction may be the fission of heavy isotopes (e.g., uranium-235, 235U). A nuclear chain reaction releases several million times more energy per reaction than any chemical reaction. History Chemical chain reactions were first proposed by German chemist Max Bodenstein in 1913, and were reasonably well understood before nuclear chain reactions were proposed. It was understood that chemical chain reactions were responsible for exponentially increasing rates in reactions, such as produced in chemical explosions. The concept of a nuclear chain reaction was reportedly first hypothesized by Hungarian scientist Leó Szilárd on September 12, 1933. Szilárd that morning had been reading in a London paper of an experiment in which protons f ...
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Neutron
The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons behave similarly within the nucleus, and each has a mass of approximately one atomic mass unit, they are both referred to as nucleons. Their properties and interactions are described by nuclear physics. Protons and neutrons are not elementary particles; each is composed of three quarks. The chemical properties of an atom are mostly determined by the configuration of electrons that orbit the atom's heavy nucleus. The electron configuration is determined by the charge of the nucleus, which is determined by the number of protons, or atomic number. The number of neutrons is the neutron number. Neutrons do not affect the electron configuration, but the sum of atomic and neutron numbers is the mass of the nucleus. Atoms of a chemical element t ...
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History Of The Teller–Ulam Design
This article chronicles the history and origins of the Teller–Ulam design, the technical concept behind modern thermonuclear weapons, also known as Nuclear weapon design#Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen bombs. The design, the details of which are military secrets known to only a handful of major nations, is believed to be used in virtually all modern nuclear weapons that make up the arsenals of the major nuclear powers. History Teller's "Super" The idea of using the energy from a fission device to begin a fusion reaction was first proposed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi to his colleague Edward Teller in the fall of 1941 during what would soon become the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort by the United States and United Kingdom to develop the first nuclear weapons. Teller soon was a participant at Robert Oppenheimer's 1942 summer conference on the development of a fission bomb held at the University of California, Berkeley, where he guided discussion towards the idea of ...
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Edward Teller
Edward Teller ( hu, Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title, considering it to be in poor taste. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BE ...
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Stan Ulam
Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures. Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski and Włodzimierz Stożek. In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish import ...
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World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ...
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Communist Party Of America
The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution. The history of the CPUSA is closely related to the history of the American labor movement and the history of communist parties worldwide. Initially operating underground due to the Palmer Raids which started during the First Red Scare, the party was influential in American politics in the first half of the 20th century and it also played a prominent role in the history of the labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, becoming known for opposing racism and racial segregation after sponsoring the defense for the Scottsboro Boys in 1931. Its membership increased during the Great Depression, and it also played a key role in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CPUSA subsequently declined due to e ...
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Complementarity (physics)
In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr regarded as an essential feature of the theory. The complementarity principle holds that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. An example of such a pair is position and momentum. Bohr considered one of the foundational truths of quantum mechanics to be the fact that setting up an experiment to measure one quantity of a pair, for instance the position of an electron, excludes the possibility of measuring the other, yet understanding both experiments is necessary to characterize the object under study. In Bohr's view, the behavior of atomic and subatomic objects cannot be separated from the measuring instruments that create the context in which the measured objects behave. Consequently, there is no "single picture" that unifies the results obtained in these different experimental contexts, and only the "totality of the phenom ...
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Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity dominated Bohr's thinking in both science and philosophy. Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cope ...
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