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Article ID: CBB787531587

Convergence in Cold War Physics: Coinventing the Maser in the Postwar Soviet Union (2019)

Silva Neto, Climério Paulo da (Author)
Kojevnikov, Alexei (Author)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Volume: 42
Issue: 4
Pages: 375-399

URI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bewi.201900009

DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201900009

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Academically sponsored science Societies; institutions; academies Science and culture Experiments and experimentation Lasers; masers Inventors and invention Physics Cold War 20th century United States Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period.

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Article Christian Joas; Thiago Hartz (2019) Quantum Cultures: Historical Perspectives on the Practices of Quantum Physicists. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (pp. 281-289). unapi

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