Crossing the Disciplinary Boundaries of Physics (Bohr-100 Centennial Celebrations)

Session

Session 5

Aug 8, 2023, 9:00 AM

Novo Nordisk Fonden

25. Secret Clocks: The U.S. Military, Einstein's Relativity, and the Global Positioning System

David Kaiser (MIT)

8/8/23, 9:00 AM

For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein's general theory of relativity in the new military technology now known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Although some exchanges were published in the open scientific literature, much of the debate played out behind the scenes, in memos,...

26. The definition of time from astronomy to physics

Shaul Katzir (Tel Aviv)

8/8/23, 9:25 AM

The definition of time was traditionally the domain of astronomers who determined the exact length of the (average) day. Combining observations and gravitational theory of the solar system, astronomers inferred in the 1920s that the Earth’s rotation around its axis is not uniform. Physicists did not contribute to this rather complicated argument until the mid-1930s when they were able to...

29. Misreading biological complementarity: Bohr and his interpreters

Phillip R. Sloan (University of Notre Dame)

8/8/23, 9:50 AM

In his August 1932 lecture to the second meeting of the International Congress for Light Therapy, Bohr made in public the transfer of his concept of “complementarity,” originally applied in physics in his paper of 1927 to the wave-particle duality, to the domain of biology. This lecture, subsequently published in English (1932, 1933), Danish (1933) and German (1933), positioned...

28. Discussion

8/8/23, 10:15 AM