After the War

Giorgio Piccardi s father, Ludovico, widowed toward the end of WWI, returned to live alone in his large Villa di CapaUe, near Florence. In his late old age, he moved in with his younger son, Giacomo (1901-75), father of Giovanni Piccardi (b. 1929), a weU-known analytical chemist at the University of Florence. Ludovico died at almost 82 years of age on 13 September 1944. 

The changing conditions following the outbreak of WWII obliged Giorgio Piccardi to return to Tuscany where he pursued his research at a war-tom university with a temporary appointment. After the war, in the academic year 1946-47, he was called to become chair of physical chemistry at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Physics at the University, a position that he occupied until 1965. 

In a certain sense he changed the way scientists think about their disciphne he was a forerunner of interdisciplinary science and pioneered new pathways that many of his colleagues did not follow or simply did not understand. Now, after these many years, it can be said that what Piccardi accomplished was not in vain because his work and ideas have not been lost but continue to live on. 

Biginelli P (1891) Intomo ad uramidi aldeidiche dell etere acetilacetico. Ber dtsch chem Gesell 

Ugi I (1962) The a-addition of immonium Ions and anions to isonitriles accompanied by secondary reactions. Angew Chem Int Ed 1 8-21 

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Zemplen helped his students in many ways. I remember an occasion in the difficult postwar period. The production of the famous Hungarian salami, interrupted by the war, was just in the process of being restarted for export. The manufacturer wanted a supportive analysis from the well-known professor. Zemplen asked for a suitable sample of some hundreds of kilograms, on which the whole institute lived for weeks. When it was gone he rightly could offer an opinion that the product was quite satisfactory. After the war, grain alcohol was for a long time the only available and widely used laboratory solvent, and, not unexpectedly, it also found other uses. Later, when it was denatured to prevent human consumption, we devised clever ways for its purification. The lab also manufactured saccharine, which was... 

Guayule, potentially a source of natural mbber, is an unusual crop in that it has been an article of commerce in the past. Guayule grows wild in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. When the leaves are milled in water, a latex is released that coagulates into natural mbber worms. These can easily be collected and relatively easily refined to give a product that is almost identical to the natural mbber from southeast Asia. During World War II there were several thousand acres of guayule planted in California and a small plant estabUshed to extract the mbber for military use. After the war. 

The polymer first became well known during World War II as a substitute for natural rubber for wire insulation and for waterproof sheeting. After the war it... 

After the war, however, there was a large surplus capacity of plant for the manufacture of styrene and polystyrene together with a great deal of knowledge and experience that had been collected over the war years. It was therefore found possible to produce polystyrene, not as an expensive electrical insulator, but as a cheap general purpose thermoplastic. 

Later, after the War, Tammann moved further towards physics by becoming interested in the mechanism of plastic deformation and the repair of deformed metals by the process of recrystallisation (following in the footsteps of Ewing and Rosenhain in Cambridge at the turn of the century), paving the way for the very extensive studies of these topics that followed soon after. Tammann thus followed... 

After 1934, research on dislocations moved very slowly, and little had been done by the time the War came. After the War, again, research at first moved slowly. In my view, it was not coincidence that theoretical work on dislocations accelerated at about the same time that the first experimental demonstrations of the actual existence of dislocations were published and turned invention into discovery . In accord with my remarks in Section 3.1.3, it was a case of seeing is believing all the numerous experimental demonstrations involved the use of a microscope. The first demonstration was my own observation, first published in 1947, of the process of polygonization, stimulated and christened by Orowan (my thesis adviser). When a metal crystal is plastically bent, it is geometrically necessary that it contains an excess of positive over negative dislocations when the crystal is then heated, most of the dislocations of... 

After the War, Tom Bacon worked for a while in the ill-fated Department of Colloid Science which we met in Chapter 2. His laboratory space there was taken away from him and he moved to the adjacent metallurgy laboratory and then again to the nearby chemical engineering department. In his own person, Tom Bacon... 

Back in the Soviet Union, he moved to the Ukraine to help, with his scientist wife, create a research institute in Dniepropetrovsk, where he continued with his researches. He was invited to be director, sought to escape from this fate (he complained that he would be a bad administrator, and that by administering he would lose contact with real science and then become unable to direct scientific work properly) but was persuaded to overcome his seruples. The rest of his long career he both administered (usually more than one institute at once) and remained a unique scientist. During the War, the institute had to move, and after the War, it was moved again, to Moscow, and Kurdyumov with it. While in Moscow, he also created a laboratory of metal physics in Kiev, Ukraine, and directed both the Moscow and the... 

After the war, Bethe became deeply involved in the peaceful applications of nuclear power, in investigating the feasibility of developing fusion bombs and bal-... 

After the war he continued to speak out on political issues, such as his open letter to the United Nations urging the formation of a world government, and his frequent condemnations in the press of Senator Joseph McCarthy s activities. After the death of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, Einstein was invited but declined to be his successor. 

Between 1948 and 1975, per capita consumption of gasoline in the United States increased from about 150 gal/yr to a little less than 500 gal/yr. A gi owing trend after the war was the increasing use of jet fuel for aircraft and the decline in use of aviation gasoline. j fter 1945, oil production increased in other parts of the world, especially the Middle East and Latin America. By the 1970s, the Middle East became a dominant oil producing region. The cartel formed by... 

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. This adage says volumes about the early development of the laser. Unring World War II, U.S. mihtaiy and civilian scientists searched frantically for improved radar. Wliile these researchers met with only mixed success, their efforts spurred basic research. After the war, using knowledge gained from this line of inquiiy, the first successful laser was developed in 1960. 

After the war, although now famous, Meitner continued her research in Stockholm, interrupted only by trips to receive honorary degrees and other scientific accolades. She shared in the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize awarded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee in 1966. She retired to Cambridge, England, m 1960, to be near her nephew, Otto Frisch, and died there hi 1968 at the age of ninety. Like so many people all over the world during the Hitler period, Meitner s life had been far from easy, but no reasonable person would ever be tempted to call her life empty. 

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