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.

Albert #Einstein’s neat cursive has achieved pop culture status: A letter he wrote featuring the E = mc² equation recently sold for nearly $1.25 million at auction. But Einstein’s handwriting is also a microcosm of his turbulent life, argues @_rdahn [1/5] physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… Einstein actually employed a different type of German handwriting early in his life. Called Kurrent script, it looks quite different than the Latin cursive still taught in some English-language schools today. [2/5]

Credit: Der Damen-Briefsteller, 1866/Public Domain

This year's #NobelPrize laureates have received their medals. If the October prize announcements feel like two years ago rather than two months, check out this thread on some of the prizewinning work: Roger Penrose received half of the #NobelPrize in Physics for his theoretical work on black holes doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

This month in Physics Today: our second annual careers issue, with a focus on early careers. Read about the initial employment of physicists who just earned their PhDs, advice on landing a tenure-track professorship, and more (thread) physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/10 Securing a faculty position can take months or even years. From applications to negotiations, Omar Magana-Loaiza, a new professor at @LSUphysastro, advises candidates on what to expect and how to prepare physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.10…

New in Physics Today's September issue: Graphene kirigami, Europe's particle physics strategy,@NASAJuno at Jupiter, and are we at the dawn of the topological age? physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/9 Graphene gets bent: Two-dimensional nanomaterials are bending the rules of the papercraft known as kirigami doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

New in the August issue of Physics Today: Sarah Frances Whiting's x-ray photography, bridging the gap between physics and biology, the warmth of wind power, and more physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/8 Sarah Frances Whiting and the “photography of the invisible”: A team of women working in the physics laboratory at Wellesley College carried out some of the first successful x-ray experiments in the US doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

In a 1794 essay, her first and only publication, Scottish chemist Elizabeth Fulhame postulated the mechanism of catalysis decades before the term was coined and documented metal photoreduction, a process crucial to the development of photography (thread) physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… The essay also addressed a raging debate of the era, on the merits of phlogiston theory. Fulhame used the evidence from her experiments to show that phlogistonists were wrong. Then she showed that antiphlogistonists were wrong too.

Today is a day of action for scientists and academics to combat anti-Black racism in their fields and communities #Strike4BlackLives #ShutDownSTEM #ShutDownAcademia (thread) shutdownstem.com
particlesforjustice.org Next in the thread are resources published recently in Physics Today that might prove useful to those taking action.

But start with these links
shutdownstem.com/resources
particlesforjustice.org/resources

New in the May issue of Physics Today: The physics labs focused on the novel coronavirus, detecting cosmic neutrinos with radar, redefining the kilogram, teaching science in prisons, and more physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/5 World’s physics instruments turn their focus to COVID-19: Scientists are employing x rays, electrons, and neutrons to decipher and disable the molecular machinery of the novel coronavirus doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

New in the April 2020 issue of Physics Today: Advances in accelerator science, the opportunities and challenges of opening a new university, and a review of a "must-read" biography of astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/4 Particle beams behind physics discoveries: Advances in accelerator technology are enabling discoveries in particle physics and other fields doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

Today we're excited to unveil a set of stories and data visualizations that chronicle the work of the @HubbleTelescope, which was launched 30 years ago this month physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…

Visualizations by @NadiehBremer
#Hubble30 #space #astronomy What has the @HubbleTelescope been looking at for the past 30 years? Here is a breakdown of the kinds of astronomical objects that the telescope has observed doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.4… #Hubble30

In 1972 Willie Hobbs Moore (1934–1994) became the first African American woman to obtain a physics PhD in the US #BlackHistoryMonth (1/4)

Credit: Ronald E. Mickens Collection, @AIP_Library, @AIP_HQ Moore is one of the pioneering physicists highlighted in a recent commentary by Jami Valentine Miller about honoring the roughly 100 African American women who have received PhDs in physics and working to make that number much higher doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.3… (2/4)

New in Physics Today's February issue: Elevating African American representation in the physical sciences, exploring why Iowa's "Goldilocks" climate for agriculture won't last, the physics of juggling, and more physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/73/2 A new @AIP_TEAMUP report calls for doubling the number of African Americans earning bachelor's degrees in physics and astronomy by 2030 doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

Here's a collection of PT-reviewed books, podcasts, and more that stood out in 2019 physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… In Freedom's Laboratory, Audra J. Wolfe provides a comprehensive account of the politicization of science during the Cold War doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

New in the December issue of Physics Today: The intrigue of Weyl semimetals, the keys to iceberg stability, and that time John Wheeler lost top-secret plans for the hydrogen bomb on a train physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/72/12 Magnetic semimetals host massless quasiparticles doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4…

Hey @nature, we hear you have a birthday coming up. We wrote about the journal's evolving role over the past 150 years as an outlet for groundbreaking physics research physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… In the first half of the 20th century, physicists like Ernest Rutherford used Nature's Letters to the Editor section to announce discoveries and scoop their competition (Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino will be awarded the 2019 #NobelPrize in Chemistry “for the development of lithium-ion batteries” To learn more about the prize, start with this primer about batteries and where lithium-ion ones fit in doi.org/10.1063/1.3047…

This month's issue of Physics Today is all about careers! physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/72/10 Its goal is to illuminate the options that physical scientists have and the choices they make, with a focus on education and early careers An examination of survey data shows that PhD physicists find satisfaction in a wide range of careers, from academia to government to industry doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4… @aipstatistics

George Carruthers, a physicist and inventor whose UV imaging instruments have been used on sounding rockets, the space shuttle, and even the Moon, turns 80 years old today doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.6… #blackandSTEM #OTD Over the years, Carruthers has actively promoted science and technology to young people, particularly African Americans, by visiting primary and secondary schools in the Washington, DC, area

It's that time of year: Next week we'll get introduced to the 2019 class of #NobelPrize laureates. In anticipation, this week we'll be tweeting some of our Nobel coverage, past and present Each year the Nobel committees select prizewinners from a list of nominees that is kept secret—for 50 years. This infographic breaks down everyone who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics through 1966 doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.4…

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated the trajectories for some of @NASA's most historic missions, turns 101 years old today physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.… An example of her work: These 6x6 transition matrices were used to predict nonlinear changes in flight positions at different distances from the Moon physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…