Space‐charge wave
FEB 01, 1949
Often the physicist, when he has found what he feels to be a satisfactory explanation of why a thing works, stores the answer and forgets the problem. Here is the story of how engineers took the physicists’ ideas concerning plasma oscillations, used and developed them in their work, and now offer their results to the physicists for their use in new fields.
DOI: 10.1063/1.3066394
There is a good deal to physics besides nuclei, uncertainty, and relativity, as every hopeful student learns. Much of it, however, has disappeared from the forefront of science, some of it moving to the engineers, and the rest remaining mostly a storehouse of tools, useful in the free‐for‐all attack on the current frontier. I can remember that spectroscopy was once a romantic subject, with its explanation of the “nebulium” lines. So was the conduction of electricity through gases.
More about the Authors
John R. Pierce. Bell Telephone Laboratories.
© 1949. American Institute of Physics
