Newton and optics
The eightieth issue of Philosophical Transactions features an article by an up-and-coming young scientist, Isaac Newton--his first scientific publication and the first major scientific article ever. Henry Oldenburg, the Transactions editor, obviously recognized the importance of this 12-page article by the relatively obscure Cambridge University professor, because it is the sole research article in the eightieth issue and was printed only about two weeks after its reception, on February 6, 1672, in handwritten manuscript form. Here is the extensive byline preceding the actual article:

A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Mathematick Professor in the University of Cambridge; containing his New Theory about Light and Colors: Where Light is declared to be not Similar or Homogeneal, but consisting of difform rays, some of which are more refrangible than others: And Colors are affirm'd to be not Qualifications of Light, deriv'd from Refractions of natural Bodies, (as {A145}tis generally believed;) but Original and Connate properties, which in divers rays are diverse: Where several Observations and Experiments are alledged to prove the said Theory.

Newton's main contention was that white light, far from being simple, as previously believed, was a compound of all the colors of the spectrum, a compound that could be decomposed by passing white light through a prism and recomposed through reversing that passage in a second prism. The claim had two basic components: first, Newton's experimental results with prisms and, second, his mechanical explanation for them--namely, that light appears to be a material body composed of particles, and rays of differently colored light refract at different angles.

The initial reception of Newton's article by the Royal Society fellows was largely positive: his article had an early impact on thinking about light and color in England and on the Continent, and it was taken seriously by the two most prominent authorities on the physics of light, Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens. Nonetheless, all did not go smoothly. Several virtuosi challenged his experimental results, and Hooke and Huygens offered plausible alternative explanations to Newton's, that light rays behaved as pulses or waves. This controversy marks the first important public difference of opinion within the emerging community of science. Newton's final response to his critics came in the form of a book, Opticks, first published in 1704.

Darwin and evolutionary theory

University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

A journal containing articles by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

The Darwinian revolution begins as a story of a young man whose father is properly anxious about his son's future, yet he agrees, with considerable misgivings, to allow his son to sail with the Beagle, a ship whose mission in circumnavigating the globe was to map the coasts of South America and to collect specimens of flora and fauna. For Darwin, the journey, which lasted five years (1831{A150}1836), was a voyage of intellectual discovery. But it was a voyage only begun on the Beagle; it was nearly a quarter of a century before Darwin published on evolution, and even then, his motive for publication was not his growing sense of certainty, but the receipt of an article by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had discerned in a flash of insight the central tenet of evolution--that its driving force was natural selection operating on variation of species in an environment of limited resources.

The Darwinian revolution was successful only in retrospect. Even with the help of allies, most famously, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's theory faced considerable opposition, not only on religious, but also on scientific grounds. For example, Darwin's theory presupposed the heritability of better adapted traits, but his original theory did not satisfactorily address this crucial issue. Ironically, six years after the Darwin{A150}Wallace articles and the Origin were published, so was a solution to Darwin's problem. Gregor Mendel's first article on heritability in the common pea was published in 1866. But it appeared in an obscure periodical and was written by a scientist equally obscure. It had no immediate influence and had to be "rediscovered" early in the following century.

Einstein and relativity theory

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First edition of a lecture on relativity given by Albert Einstein in 1920.

The year 1905 has to be considered an annus mirabilis in the long history of the scientific article. For that is the year Albert Einstein--a technical expert in the Swiss patent office freelancing on theoretical physics problems--published four ground-breaking articles in Annalen der Physik. They included not only his first two articles on relativity theory, but also one offering a mathematical explanation for Brownian motion, and another proposing a mechanical explanation for the photoelectric effect.

Over the next decade Einstein continued to build his "principle of relativity" in a remarkable series of articles altering forever our notions of time, space, motion, gravity, light, mass, and energy. The 1905 article entitled "Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem energieinhalt Abhängig? " (Does the Inertia of a Body depend on its energy Content?) is typical of Einstein's relativity articles: a Euclidean deduction from some basic postulates leads to a startling prediction--the equivalence of mass and energy, E = mc². This revelation is a mathematical expression directly in accord with Einstein's philosophy of science. According to this philosophy, physics is the search for laws that describe relationships among fundamental entities that completely determine physical laws. "I still believe in the possibility of a model of reality," wrote Einstein in 1954, "that is to say, of a theory which represents things themselves."

Fermi and nuclear research
More than a half century ago Enrico Fermi stood in Squash Courts under the stands at Stagg Field, a football arena abandoned at the end of the 1939 season, the last inglorious year of Division I football at the University of Chicago. It was the morning of December 2, 1942, and the first atomic pile was about to go critical. Here is how Fermi described the events of that day:

Soon after, Arthur Holly Compton, the project leader at Chicago, made a call to James Bryant Conant in Washington. Since the call was made on an insecure line, the conversation was in an impromptu code. "Jim," Compton said, "you'll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world." Conant wondered "Were the natives friendly?" "Everyone landed safe and happy" was Compton's reply.

Throughout his illustrious career, Fermi published extensively on his nuclear research, winning the 1938 Nobel Prize for his discovery of "new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and...nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons." Understandably, his journal publications came to an abrupt halt in 1941 and then resumed after the war.