"The Impact of the Great War on Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, and Other Sciences"

 

 

 

 

WWII has been called the physicists' war (meaning radar, rockets, and fission
bombs) and WWI the chemists' war (everyone thinks first of poison gases,
but nitrogen fixation, synthetic rubber, and many other products were also
vital).  In fact, both wars changed all the sciences, some beyond recognition,
affecting individuals (deaths of Moseley and Karl Schwarzschild), communities
(putting women into labs and industry), and nations (the establishment of the
National Research Council when Edison's advice to the president proved
perfectly useless).

   For astronomy, the first event was the August, 1914 imprisonment of a German
eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea at the request of Einstein, to
look for bending of starlight by the sun (before the correct value had been
calculated). Other distinguished scientists were caught on wrong sides of
borders, served and survived (Lemaitre, Minkowski), tried to serve but didn't
arrive in time (Hubble), or stayed firmly home (Shapley, Eddington).

 

   Bomb craters taught geologists and selenologists that oblique impacts as
well as volcanoes could make circular craters.  There was, largely by accident,
a random-controlled test of the efficacy of typhoid innoculation (it worked)
and tetanus as well.

 

   The scientific end came in 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles and the
founding of the International Research Council (now ICSU) and its member unions,
IUPAP, IUPAC, IAU, and others, firmly limited initially to nations "at war
with the Central Powers."  Indeed Germany did not adhere to the IAU until
1952.  Also in 1919, Eddington's eclipse expeditions went to Sobral and
Principe and measured the advertized GR light bending.  Einstein was, of course,
right, and the IAU was founded with Commission No. 1 = Relativity.  It voted
itself out of existence in 1925 on the grounds that everything had been done.
Indeed I was surprised at just how many fundamental GR papers were written
during WWI (not just Einstein & Hilbert and Schwarzschild, but Lense-
Thirring, Reissner-Nordstrom, and others)

 

   There is one mention of astronomy in the Peace Treaty itself -- Germany
is required to return to China astronoical instrumentation that was removed
from Peking in 1900-01!  Of the hundreds of international conferences and
societies that had sprung up in 1890-1910, only about a dozen were allowed
to continue.  Hale's Solar Union, the Carte du Ciel, and the group that had
planned to rationalize organic chemistry nomenclature were not among them.