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Plasticine and Valves: Industry, Instrumentation and the Emergence of Nuclear Physics

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The Invisible Industrialist

Part of the book series: Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History ((STMMH))

Abstract

It is scientific lore that experimental physics before the Second World War relied on ’sealing-wax and string.’ Synonymous with small-scale, benchtop science, ’sealing-wax and string’ feature prominently in reminiscences about prewar physics, where they have somehow come to epitomise a golden age of innocence before big science and the bomb, the nostalgic era of heroic individuals doing science with whatever meagre resources came to hand. The phrase has become a shorthand for a style, a way of doing physics. It has also come to stand for a certain penuriousness that is taken to be characteristic of much of prewar physics. In that it connotes an altogether more relaxed world, closer to the gentlemanly milieu of nineteenth-century science than to the high-pressure, high-finance ethos of that of the late twentieth, ’sealing-wax and string’ has become one of the central myths of the history of early-twentieth-century physics.1

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Notes

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Hughes, J. (1998). Plasticine and Valves: Industry, Instrumentation and the Emergence of Nuclear Physics. In: Gaudillière, JP., Löwy, I. (eds) The Invisible Industrialist. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26443-8_3

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