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Van Der Kloot, William

 
9781781554029: Great Scientists Wage the Great War

Sinopsis

Six men made major scientific breakthroughs during the First World War and in doing so altered its course. Lawrence Bragg pinpointed the position of enemy artillery pieces with sound ranging, which enabled British tanks to break through in late 1917 and 1918. His father worked with the French to develop high frequency echolocation; if the war had gone on longer sonar would have curbed the U-boats. Ernest Starling led a group that discovered the cause of wound shock and saved shocked men with artificial plasma. He utilized what was known about metabolism to ration food fairly in Britain while improving the poor s nutrition. Germans starved. Otto Hahn worked on poisons for gas warfare and devised and tested filters to trap the poisons. He also became an expert on tactics for breaking through enemy lines with gas. Chaim Weizmann and other chemists produced molecules essential for making high explosives; German chemists enabled their side to keep in the war. Antiaircraft defense was developed by the physiologist A. V. Hill who led more than 100 scientists and mathematicians, who learned how to aim supersonic shells to explode near fast-moving targets. Now these threads are brought together for general readers, telling how some of the foremost scientists of all time used their remarkable talents for significant war research. The information comes from their memoirs, letters, reports in the archives, and from coworkers recollections. Four of these brilliant and diverting men were Nobel laureates and one became the president of Israel. The work of two outstanding women is described in the narrative."

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Acerca del autor

A book about history and science should be written by someone with feet planted firmly in both camps. William Van der Kloot was born in the US and served in the US Navy at the tail end of WW2. He studied Biology at Harvard, with shorter periods at the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge. He researched and taught at Harvard, Cornell, NYU School of Medicine, and Stony Brook University, where he became Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. He has published some 160 papers, including several on the history of neuroscience. His interest in the Great War began in childhood from the tales of his father and uncles; as he worked in science he studied the War on the side. Later in life he left the laboratory bench for the archives and libraries, where step by step he uncovered how much scientists had altered the course of the war. A surprise because so little has been written about it. In the past decade the Royal Society has published five of his articles on science in WW1 and he has published two books on other aspects of the War. It is hard to imagine a better preparation for writing the present book, which tells general readers what six deeply involved, preeminent scientists did.

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