This book describes the life, times and science of the Soviet physicist Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov (1901-1937). From 1926 to 1930 Shubnikov worked in Leiden where he was the co-discoverer of the Shubnikov-De Haas effect. After his return to the Soviet Union he founded in Kharkov in Ukraine the first low-temperature laboratory in the Soviet Union, which in a very short time became the foremost physics institute in the country and among other things led to the discovery of type-II superconductivity. In August 1937 Shubnikov, together with many of his colleagues, was arrested and shot early in November 1937. This gripping story gives deep insights into the pioneering work of Soviet physicists before the Second World War, as well as providing much previously unpublished information about their brutal treatment at the hands of the Stalinist regime.

In the 1930s, hundreds of scientists and scholars fled Hitler’s Germany. Many found safety, but some made the disastrous decision to seek refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The vast majority of these refugee scholars were arrested, murdered, or forced to flee the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. Many of the survivors then found themselves embroiled in the Holocaust. Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin explores the forced migration of these displaced academics from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. The book follows the lives of thirty-six scholars through some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. It reveals that not only did they endure the chaos that engulfed central Europe in the decades before Hitler came to power, but they were also caught up in two of the greatest mass murders in history. David Zimmerman examines how those fleeing Hitler in their quests for safe harbour faced hardship and grave danger, including arrest, torture, and execution by the Soviet state. Drawing on German, Russian, and English sources, Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin illustrates the complex paths taken by refugee scholars in flight.

A definitive scholarly edition of the correspondence and papers of Albert Einstein During the period covered by this volume, Einstein aims to discover whether one can derive the electron’s equations of motion directly from the field equations of general relativity, and he embarks on a new approach to unified field theory founded on teleparallel geometry. On these topics, he engages in exchanges with J. Grommer, C. Lanczos, and particularly with C. H. Müntz, and corresponds with mathematicians like R. Weitzenböck and É. Cartan. Einstein attends what will be considered a historic 1927 Solvay Conference where the new quantum mechanics is discussed, but in fact he makes very few remarks. In an important prelude to his eventual emigration to the United States, he is invited in September 1927 to accept a research professorship at Princeton University. Despite the sudden onset of a severe heart ailment in 1928, followed by an almost year-long period of convalescence, Einstein maintains a sustained engagement with scientific work, correspondence, and social and political issues. He publishes many articles and interviews designed for a popular audience and continues various technical preoccupations, including publishing a patent for a novel “people’s” refrigerator and being intimately involved in the design of his famous sailboat. Einstein advocates for domestic legislative reform, gay and minority rights, European rapprochement, and conscientious objection to military service. He resigns from his positions at the Hebrew University. He also tries to avoid the fanfare marking his fiftieth birthday in March 1929 yet is “buried under a paper avalanche” from the tributes. His hiring of Helen Dukas as his assistant, who accompanies Einstein to the end of his life, is of great significance for the ultimate preservation of his written legacy.

A definitive scholarly edition of the correspondence and papers of Albert Einstein This volume finds Einstein recovered and traveling again after a prolonged illness, to Paris, London, and Zurich to receive three honorary doctorates; to the Sixth Solvay Congress in Brussels and to Leyden; and to attend the Constituent Meeting of the Jewish Agency Council in Zurich and the twelfth session of the ICIC in Geneva. By the end of the volume, Einstein embarks on a transatlantic voyage for the first time in five years to spend an academic term at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Einstein’s work focuses on the teleparallel approach to unified field theory, on which he engages in intensive correspondence with Élie Cartan and begins his collaboration with Walther Mayer. He also presents popular accounts of his work, surveying the historical progression from classical to twentieth-century physics leading up to the latest developments in unified field theory. He also engages in lively exchanges on both technical and foundational issues in quantum mechanics with W. Pauli, M. Born, M. Schlick, and others. His personal correspondence reflects eventful changes: the Einsteins realize their dream of owning a summer house outside Berlin, Einstein becomes a grandfather, his younger son Eduard commences his university studies and has his first serious mental health crisis, and his younger stepdaughter Margot gets married. Einstein’s ties to the Zionist movement are seriously tested in the wake of the violence that erupts in British Mandate Palestine in 1929, to which he reacts with forceful calls for a genuine symbiosis between Jews and Arabs, proposing the establishment of joint administrative, economic, and social organizations. He warns that without finding “the path to honest cooperation and honest negotiations with the Arabs,” “we [Jews] have learned nothing from our two-thousand-year ordeal and deserve the fate that will befall us.” In Germany, too, Einstein champions democracy in the face of rising support for the Nazi Party, is active on behalf of Jewish refugees, opposes the death penalty, and supports abortion rights and the decriminalization of homosexuality. Einstein promotes pacifism more vigorously. His efforts to promote peace follow three distinct transnational avenues: disarmament, conscientious objection, and apolitical pacifism, aimed “to find practical mechanisms to restrict the nation state.”

The subject of the book is a biography of the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Although Sommerfeld is famous as a quantum theorist for the elaboration of the semi-classical atomic theory (Bohr-Sommerfeld model, Sommerfeld's fine-structure constant), his role in the history of modern physics is not confined to atoms and quanta. Sommerfeld left his mark in the history of mathematics, fluid mechanics, a number of physical subdisciplines and, in particular, as founder of a most productive "school" (Peter Debye, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Linus Pauling and Hans Bethe were his pupils, to name only the Nobel laureates among them). This biography is to a large extent based on primary source material (correspondence, diaries, unpublished manuscripts). It should be of particular interest to students who are keen to know more about the historical roots of modern science. Sommerfeld lived through turbulent times of German history (Wilhelmian Empire, Weimar Republic, Nazi period). His life, therefore, illustrates how science and scientists perform in changing social environments. From this perspective, the biography should also attract readers with a general interest in the history of science and technology.

The most important result obtained by Prof. B. Alexeev and reflected in the book is connected with new theory of transport processes in gases, plasma and liquids. It was shown by Prof. B. Alexeev that well-known Boltzmann equation, which is the basement of the classical kinetic theory, is wrong in the definite sense. Namely in the Boltzmann equation should be introduced the additional terms which generally speaking are of the same order of value as classical ones. It leads to dramatic changing in transport theory. The coincidence of experimental and theoretical data became much better. Particularly it leads to the strict theory of turbulence and possibility to calculate the turbulent flows from the first principles of physics.·Boltzmann equation (BE) is valid only for particles, which can be considered as material points, generalized Boltzmann equation (GBE) removes this restriction.·GBE contains additional terms in comparison with BE, which cannot be omitted·GBE leads to strict theory of turbulence·GBE gives all micro-scale turbulent fluctuations in tabulated closed analytical form for all flows ·GBE leads to generalization of electro-dynamic Maxwell equations·GBE gives new generalized hydrodynamic equations (GHE) more effective than classic Navier-Stokes equations·GBE can be applied for description of flows for intermediate diapason of Knudsen numbers·Asymptotical solutions of GBE remove contradictions in the theory of Landau damping in plasma

The recent observation of the Higgs boson has been hailed as the scientific discovery of the century and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. This book describes the detailed science behind the decades-long search for this elusive particle at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN and at the Tevatron at Fermilab and its subsequent discovery and characterization at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Written by physicists who played leading roles in this epic search and discovery, this book is an authoritative and pedagogical exposition of the portrait of the Higgs boson that has emerged from a large number of experimental measurements. As the first of its kind, this book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers in particle physics.