Almagest

The German student Oscar Bünemann, in trouble with the Nazi authorities in the mid-1930s, chose to emigrate to Britain and pursue a PhD there. After emigration, his surname appears as Buneman. On the verge of completing his degree in 1940, he was detained as an enemy alien and spent almost a year in internment. Upon release, he found work as an atomic scientist in England, and went on to lead a post-war career as a pioneering plasma physicist in the USA.

We study forced migration of European scientists before and during the Second World War, and scientific patronage in the host countries. Buneman’s case is interesting from several points of view. Being a non-Jewish, non-communist, anti-Nazi activist, he belongs to a group not much investigated by historians. His emigration from Germany was facilitated by his family’s business contacts in Britain. Being caught up in the wave of detainments of enemy aliens in 1940, he was assisted in pleading for release by the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, the archives of which abound with information about refugee scientists from Nazi Germany. We have also had access to material not available to previous investigators, kindly provided by Buneman’s family.

This is the story of a book that was published in Russian in 1938. This book was not famous and successful at the time, but became rather popular on a wave of recent interest in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction as a classic example of periodical chemical and physiochemical processes. The authors developed the themes of earlier studies that were published in Germany, England, France including rhythmic structures in chemistry, mineralogy, histology and metallurgy. Some new approaches are also present in the book such as: the general theory of oscillations (Schwingungslehre), de Broglie waves. The book contains a comprehensive review of literature in the field.

The volume under examination was based on publications in national and international journals and reflects informal discussion and collaboration. A small informal group arose in the course of the collaboration. The methods, content and interpretation are characteristic of the early Soviet science that hinges on the attempt to formulate global problems, yet often suffers from the lack of sufficient theoretical backgrounds.

This article discusses the highlights of the creation of one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20^th century - the theory of the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) and completes the picture with some previously unnoticed strokes. The focus is on A.N. Kolmogorov, who played a key role in the creation of the theory. А. Poincare has shown that in the vast majority of cases dynamical systems are non-integrable. The perturbation theory is among the principal methods for solving problems of dynamics and Poincaré brought to the forefront the significance of the disturbance of an integrable Hamiltonian system as a "fundamental problem" of dynamics. Kolmogorov’s main result in this direction can be formulated as follows: for the majority of the initial conditions and the non-degeneracy of the unperturbed motion for a sufficiently small perturbation the most non-resonant tori are only being deformed, keeping to itself the trajectory of conditionally periodic motions with constant frequencies. Resonant tori are being destroyed under the influence of the disturbance, and the trajectories become stochastic. Kolmogorov limited himself to establishing all the key components of the solution of this problem and did not complete the proof of the results. This was done a few years after the appearance of Kolmogorov’s works by V.I. Arnold and J. Moser.

Sur le lieu-dit « Doumet » de la commune de Châteauvert, un cadran solaire a été mis au jour de façon fortuite en 1993. L'analyse de l'instrument indique qu'il s'agit d'un élément bien particulier de la gnomonique antique, un cadran plan vertical dièdre. Cette typologie même, de type pelecinum, en fait un objet particulièrement rare pour la Gaule antique. L'état de conservation de l'ensemble des éléments constitutifs du cadran est par ailleurs unique dans le corpus des cadrans solaires de ce type connus pour l'ensemble du monde antique. Enfin, la qualité de l'exécution ainsi que le lieu même de la découverte, à l'écart de tout centre connu ou de construction antiques interrogent sur la destination de cet objet. Une simple fonction de cadran solaire étonne en effet sur un site aussi isolé. L'hypothèse qu’il provienne d'une pile funéraire servant de marqueur topographique sur une hauteur proche d’une voie publique romaine, sur un point critique aux confins des cités antiques d'Aix et de Fréjus est proposée.

The crucial role of aesthetic principles -beauty, harmony (as the unity of everything in existence) and symmetry (as a mathematical method for the description of harmony)- in the development of physical models of the universe from Ancient Greece until recently is discussed hereunder. Moreover, a heuristic role of aesthetic principles, especially regarding symmetry, in the discovery of new laws of nature is revealed. Since the beginning of the 20^th century a new methodology of science has been formed: to discover new laws of nature, assuming that they possess the certain invariance. The history of physics very much allows for revealing an interdependence of epistemological and aesthetical aspects of physics and could be regarded as one of the ways to instill an holistic view of nature among students of high technical schools.