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Jun 6, 2019 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The Allies' accurate prediction of astronomical tides was crucial for the success of the Normandy invasion doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1… #DDay75
The Germans had built obstacles on the beaches that became immersed by midtide. So the Allies wanted to land near first light and soon after low tide, to give their engineers a chance to destroy the obstacles. Image
The Allies needed to accurately and precisely calculate the tides. They achieved that using mechanical analog computers, including one designed by Lord Kelvin Image
Once the invasion began, the tide predictions proved to be quite accurate. And the Germans were not as prepared as they should have been, in part because they expected the Allies to come at high tide Image
Weather was a major factor in the decision to attack on 6 June rather than 5 June as initially planned. British meteorologist James Stagg and colleagues correctly predicted a break in the weather for the invasion doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.6… Image
Image credits: German Federal Archive; Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory; H. R. Seiwell, Mil. Eng. 39, 202 (1947)

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May 19, 2022
A historian’s dream, the Farm Hall transcripts capture the secretly recorded conversations of Werner Heisenberg and 9 other German physicists discussing the atomic bomb in 1945. So why do scholars disagree on what they tell us? 🧵#histSTM #twitterstorians physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…
The Farm Hall transcripts are among the most famous primary sources in 20th-century physics. They document conversations between 10 German physicists suspected of working on an atomic project for Nazi Germany, including Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.
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📷 AIP ESVA/NARA Farm Hall, in 1945 or 1946.
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