The Age of Innocence: Nuclear Physics between the First and Second World Wars

This history of nuclear physics sets the experimental innovations and theoretical breakthroughs in the field in the period between the two world wars within the contexts of the lives and personalities of the physicists who made them; the physical and intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in which they worked; and the political upheavals after the Great War of 1914-18: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the intellectual migration of gifted physicists from Germany and later from Austria and Italy. The book is clearly written, richly illustrated, and can be understood by a general readership of scholars, teachers, students, and the public at large.