Alexandre Proca or the internationalism of physics during the twenties and thirties

• Autores: Martha Cecilia Bustamante
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 818-821
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Alexandre Proca (1897-1955) is one of the prominent figures of physics in France between the two wars. He has been a key player in efforts to give to the theoretical physics research a prominent place in the country. In France, as shown by historical studies, physics research was at that time largely dominated by the experimental tradition. Proca also occupies a place in the history of quantum field theory. Author of one of the first doctoral thesis in relativistic quantum theory in France, he proposed the equations that bear his name, Proca equations, which describe particles of spin 1.

    From Bucharest to Paris, from engineering sciences to theoretical physics, from theoretical work to the activity of organizing research, Proca followed a singular trajectory whose strongest meaning appears in the light of his “internationalism” (linguistic, intellectual and geographical), but especially in the light of the general scientific internationalism that develops at that time. This is what we intend to show in our presentation.

    Proca illustrated in the hard political, intellectual and scientific French context in the thirties and very concretely in the specific context of Parisian world of research. It is marked by great figures (Paul Langevin, Marie Curie, Jean Perrin, Emile Borel ...) and by the emergence of the new Institut Henri Poincaré. Deriving from internationalist projects of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute H. Poincaré, where Proca conducts his activities, is devoted to the development of theoretical physics. We will consider these facts to better understand Proca’s trajectory and, more general, the ways in which scientific internationalism materializes at European level and in the inter-war period.