The History of Astronomy

Early Astronomers
The history of astronomy goes back several thousand years ago. Almost all ancient cultures had stories about how the universe was created, what it was like, who created it, and how the earth and humans got here, but those stories are usually not very believable. The early Egyptians believed that the universe was a large rectangular box with Egypt at the center of the bottom and with huge lamps which hung down from the top for stars. The ideas of the other cultures which were near Egypt usually had the same concept of an enclosed space with that culture’s part of the world at the center. One major factor holding the ancient cultures back from developing the technology to look farther into the cosmos was their belief in many unpredictable gods who controlled the universe. If the universe was unpredictable because of gods, why try to understand it if what you learned could become obsolete at the whim of the next god. The only culture that worshipped one God who made a predictable universe at that time were the Jews. The Bible, which came from that culture, later had a profound positive impact on science.

Some of the astronomers in the ancient cultures kept records of their observations. The Chinese have records going back to about the 1300s B.C. By about 700 B.C., the Babylonians could predict certain heavenly events. By about 600 B.C., the Greeks started to get interested in astronomy.

The Greeks

The first ancient culture that usually comes to mind as being more aware of the truth of their surroundings than other cultures of that time period are the Greeks. In fact, our word astronomy comes from the Greek words meaning "law and order". The Greeks were not the first culture to try their hand at astronomy but the work of their philosophers was widely distributed by the Romans and was the accepted authority on that subject for hundreds of years. The Greeks discovered that the earth was a sphere by several methods and the philosopher Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth to within about 300 kilometers of today’s generally accepted value. In about 200 BC Aristarchus first stated that the earth revolves around the sun but most philosophers argued that everything revolves around earth.

There were apparently also some cultures about which we know little who were interested in astronomy. Stonehenge and the various other similar structures which appear to be ancient calendars are some examples of monuments built by those groups.

Ptolemy
Around 150 A.D. Ptolemy (100?-165? A.D.), an Alexandrian astronomer, invented the concentric system to explain the motions of the planets around the earth. His work was the accepted authority on astronomy until 1543.

To fully understand why some of the early modern astronomer’s ideas were not accepted and why some of those ideas led the astronomers to be ridiculed, it is helpful to have a background on what was happening to the culture at that time.

For a time under the Romans, from about 300 BC to 476 AD, there was a decline in the study of astronomy in favor of astrology and some of the works of the Greek philosophers were destroyed.

Modern Astronomy

The modern history of astronomy starts in Europe in about 1300 AD. Before that time, the Roman Catholic Church had been the dominant religion in Europe and at times had more control over countries than did the kings of those countries. The Roman Catholic Church started in about 300 AD under the Roman emperor Constantine. Over time, the popes started getting more powerful because of the fact they were the heads of a religion followed by most of Europe and gradually replaced the empire as the center of power. During that time, some of the popes introduced some controversial beliefs to increase their power and the popes and most of the clergy became corrupt. By the 1200s, it was obvious that most of the clergy were more interested in gaining political power than in helping the people spiritually.

In 324 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium, present day Istanbul, and renamed it Constantinople. As he built up his new capital, he collected and stored many of the ancient writings of the Greek philosophers in libraries in the city. In 395 AD, the empire split up into two parts. The eastern half had its capital in Constantinople and was called the Byzantine empire. The western half had its capital in Rome. The church also split into two parts; the eastern half was called the Eastern Orthodox Church and the western part was called the Roman Catholic Church. Each church also had its own pope and very different ideas. In about 476 AD the western half of the empire was destroyed by the Visigoths, Vandals, and other Germanic tribes. Southern Europe was then plunged into what is now called the Dark and Middle Ages, which was marked by frequent wars and a lack of strong governments. During that time, not much learning at all occurred and most of the population lived under lords as serfs. The priests of the Roman Catholic Church, however, kept education from dying out completely during that time. The eastern empire stayed together for another thousand years until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople. Before the Turks could capture Constantinople and make it into Istanbul, however, most of the population fled the city, taking with them the works of the ancient Greek philosophers. As the knowledge from the city spread throughout Europe, it helped start what is now called the Renaissance.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance, which took place from the early 1300s to about 1600, was a time in which people in southern Europe began to learn, which had not taken place there much since the western empire fell. As the people started to learn, they saw the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church which led them to turn away from it altogether and to start pursuing the improvement of themselves with knowledge. They got much of that knowledge from the monasteries of Catholic Church which had preserved most of the books written before that time.

Starting in the 1500s, the learning from southern Europe began to enlighten the people in the north. In northern Europe, however, when they saw the corruption of the church, instead of turning away from the church, they tried to reform it. This period is called the Reformation. During the Reformation, people began to read the Bible for themselves, which the Roman Catholic Church was supposed to be based on, and found beliefs in the Bible which they thought were contrary to the beliefs of the church. Some of these people started the Protestant movement. Many thousands of people were killed, usually being burned as heretics, because of their belief in things which were contrary to what the pope, who set the beliefs of the Catholic Church, said. The Catholic Church was still very powerful and one of the beliefs that the pope set is that the earth itself is the center of the universe and that all other heavenly bodies revolve around it. This is the reason that the church persecuted those who believed Copernicus’s ideas about the sun being the center of the solar system.

The printing press was invented in the year 1430 which helped spread information about all of the sciences. This made the common man able to afford a book, which before then had to be handwritten and thus were very expensive. By this time, most educated people were aware that the earth was a sphere.

Copernicus

About that time a Polish canon of ecclesiastic law and astronomer named Copernicus (1473-1543) began to wonder if there could be a more aesthetically pleasing and reasonable arrangement for the planets than the concentric system. He studies Aristarchus’s heliocentric ideas and built a new system out of it. He developed a system where all of the planets, including earth, orbit the sun and where each one of these orbits was in the shape of a circle with the sun at its center. After almost forty years of study, he published his monumental book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs in 1543, the year he died. He was never able to prove his ideas but later advances in physics would make it possible to prove a version of those ideas.

Copernicus’s book caused an amazing amount of controversy. Martin Luther attacked his book by saying that Copernicus was "the fool who would overthrow the whole science of astronomy." Religious leaders attacked the heliocentric system by saying that they were contrary to scriptural revelations. The publisher of his book even inserted an anonymous apologetic note the readers of his book implying that his ideas were far fetched. Since the heliocentric cosmology was contrary to church ideas, advocating Copernicus’s ideas was punishable as heresy so the scientific community at that time was extremely reluctant to have anything to do with it. Philosopher Giordano Bruno committed this "crime" and was burned at the stake.

Copernicus’s ideas were not perfect because, since he believed that the planets move in perfect circles, he had to insert some epicycles and other mathematical structures into his theory which made it about as inaccurate as Ptolemy’s system. However, Copernicus’s theory was a tremendous leap in astronomy.

The next person to make an advance in astronomy was Tyco Brahe (1546-1601). With help from King Frederick II, he built an observatory on the Island of Hveen that was equipped with the most accurate pre-telescopic instruments for observing space ever built. He was able to determine positions of objects to within one minute of an arc, far more accurate than any previous attempt. Brahe constructed an uninterrupted record of the positions of many planets and other bodies for several years, but he did not accept Copernicus’s ideas. His idea of the universe was a compromise, he believed that the five planets orbited the sun, but the sun orbited the earth. He reasoned that the motion of the earth would be felt and he thought that Copernicus’s ideas were unscriptural.

Kepler

As the Renaissance was coming to and end, a German man named Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who
believed Copernicus, started looking at the records of Brahe’s observations. He discovered that none of the ideas presented thus far about the motions of heavenly bodies lined up to the evidence in Brahe’s records so he formulated his own ideas. After seventeen years of work, he finally came up with the true motions of the planets and published them in two books in 1609 and 1619. He discovered that the planets move around the sun in ellipses with one focus of the ellipse at the center of the sun and the other focus at a usually unoccupied point in space. He also came up with rules for their movements called Kepler’s laws.

Because of Kepler and Brahe, astronomers now had a model for the solar system that actually fit the evidence and that could be used to predict future events or reconstruct past ones. This was a giant leap for astronomy but the work still remained to give reasons for what Kepler observed.

Galileo

Living at the same time as Kepler, an Italian named Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made the next breakthrough for astronomy. Galileo is probably best known for some experiments with falling objects from the leaning tower in Pisa, his home town, but he also made some exciting discoveries with his homemade telescopes and experimented with pendulums. Galileo was also a believer in the Copernican theory. Since Ptolemy first made up his concentric model, many people argued that Ptolemy’s theory must be true because they reasoned that the earth would leave the moon behind if it traveled around the sun. In 1610, Galileo made the discovery with his telescope, which was the most advanced at that time, that Jupiter had at least four moons orbiting it. This was proof against the concentric system because Jupiter’s moons were orbiting Jupiter and not the Earth, which everything orbited according to Ptolemy’s concentric model. If Jupiter could retain its satellites, then the Earth could retain the moon as it went around the sun. He published a paper about his findings and got in trouble twice with the Roman Catholic Church which placed him under house arrest until his death for advocating the Copernican theory.

Newton

The science of astronomy still needed one more piece in its foundation for others to build upon. This piece was contributed by an English man named Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton was an astronomer, scientist, and mathematician who investigated the laws of gravity and made spectacular discoveries about light. He formulated laws which explained how objects move and how gravity operates. He also laid the ground work for the study of spectrum analysis. He also made the first reflecting telescope which made possible the huge observatory telescopes of today.

The laws provided by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were not perfect but they had a good degree of reliability and were used for many years. There have been revisions of their laws by Albert Einstein and others but the original laws are still used by many for calculations that do not need an extremely high degree of precision.

Einstein

One of the most profound impacts on science were two theories proposed by Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) realized that all motion was relative, that is, coordinates and the descriptions of movements meant nothing unless the reference body was defined. He also had evidence that the speed of light was a constant, being the same speed no matter how fast an observer is moving, which violates the Newtonian laws of motions but was later demonstrated experimentally. In creating his theory, he made the requirements that all defined laws must work with respect to all bodies of reference and that the speed of light with respect to all bodies was the same. To bring the requirements into one theory, he used a set of mathematical formulas called the Lorentz transformation. The Lorentz transformation defined the formulas to use when converting coordinates from one reference body to another when the first body is moving at a constant speed with respect to the second. With these formulas, he discovered that time and mass cannot be constant for the speed of light to be constant; thus, time can not be separated from space so the two must exist together in a four dimensional space-time continuum. For instance, if two trains are moving on two parallel tracks in the same direction at different speeds toward a light source, and the speed of light from the light source is the same for both of them, then time for the faster train must be slightly slowed. In 1905, Einstein published his findings in his Special Theory of Relativity. The Special Theory of Relativity could only be used in the absence of gravitational fields so he published his General Theory of Relativity in 1916. The General Theory of Relativity basically says that all matter curves space, and in turn, how space is curved affects the movement of matter, which explains gravitational fields. This theory is constantly being validated by modern scientific experiments.

Space Exploration

The history of space exploration starts at about this time. In 1926, an American scientist named Robert H. Goddard built and flew the first successful liquid propelled rocket. By 1930, groups were being formed which experimented with rockets and by the early 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union were both researching high altitude rockets.

The Space Race

During the cold war in the 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union announced plans to launch earth-orbiting satellites. This began what is called the "space race". At first, Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the U.S. at the time, was reluctant to get involved in the race because he thought that an American satellite orbiting the earth above the Soviet Union’s territory would be seen as a threat and start a war.

At this time, the U.S. military had a high altitude rocket called the Jupiter. On a missile test flight on September 20, 1956, the Jupiter rocket was flying over the South Atlantic when its nose cone briefly went into space before arching down to the ocean. The Jupiter’s designer and a few others knew that the nose cone, if detached, could have gone fast enough to orbit the earth. The Pentagon suspected that the Army might try to "accidentally" put another Jupiter nose cone into orbit so they ordered the Army to fill the nose cones with sand and to disable the Jupiter’s fourth stage.

Sputnik 1 and Explorer

One year and 14 days later, on October 4, 1957, the Russians put a small sphere with a radio transmitter into orbit, which was the first manmade satellite to orbit the earth. They named this small satellite Sputnik 1 and it prompted the Americans to put their own satellite into orbit. On January 31, 1958, the American satellite Explorer, which had some scientific equipment, was put into orbit with a Jupiter C rocket. Explorer had been fitted with a special Geiger counter from physicist James Van Allen which recorded the previously unknown Van Allen belts of radiation around earth.

Human Exploration

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy became president and on May 25 of that same year announced the goal of sending an American to moon and bringing him back safely. To reach this goal, he executed the Apollo program. Before humans could go to the moon, however, humans needed to at least get into orbit. Before humans went into orbit, each country used animals to test the technology.

The Soviets were the first ones to send an animal into space. In 1957, they sent a dog named Laika into orbit in a capsule named Sputnik 2. She survived for a week before running out of oxygen.

The Americans were next, on January 31, 1961, they shot a chimpanzee named Ham in a Mercury capsule to an altitude of 157 miles. The chimp was recovered in good health.

That year, on April 12, the Soviet Yuri Gagarin was the first person in space. The Americans followed on May 5 with Alan Shepard being the first American in space. Gagarin’s flight lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes and he was in orbit 89 minutes. His highest altitude was 203 miles above the earth. Shepard’s flight lasted 15 minutes and he rocketed to 117 miles above the earth but did not make it to orbit.

On February 20 1962, John Glen became the first American to orbit the earth. His trip lasted 4 hours and 55 minutes and he orbited the earth three times. His highest altitude was 162.5 miles.

For years after that, the space race between the Soviets and the Americans continued and many more people orbited the earth as the technology progressed. The race finally ended on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon and Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. The United States sent a total of 12 men to the moon, the last being Eugene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission on December 14, 1972. No human has walked on the moon since. The Soviets never made it to the moon.

Since then, many scientists have made discoveries and developed the technology to look farther into the cosmos, but not much could have happened without those first astronomers, philosophers, and scientists taking time to look at our universe for what it really was.

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What Happened Before The Big Bang?

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht

One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe — as a cosmologist — isn’t quite about the Big Bang in and of itself.

The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image source unknown.

The Big Bang is a remarkable idea, of course, that says that, based on the observations that the Universe is expanding and cooling today, it was hotter, denser, and physically smaller in the past. This gets particularly exciting when we extrapolate very far back in the history of the Universe.

Image credit: Addison Wesley.

At some point in the past, it was so hot that individual atoms would have been blasted apart by the radiation in the Universe. This means that — as we come forward in time past that point — there was a point when all the nuclei and electrons in the Universe became stable, neutral atoms for the first time.

Image credit: Pearson / Addison Wesley, retrieved from Jill Bechtold.

And before that, it was so hot that individual nuclei would have been blasted apart. But you might think that this means we can go back to arbitrarily high temperatures, densities, and arbitrarily small sizes. You might be tempted to go all the way to a point in time where spacetime collapses into a singularity, and where all the matter and energy in the Universe were present at a single point, of infinite temperature and infinite density.

Image retrieved from University of Arizona. And yes, longtime readers, this is wrong.

Indeed, this is one of the most tempting things to try.
But physically, it’s also wrong. (Lots of good scientists and science institutions goof this, too.) You see, we know that this isn’t what happened in the Universe’s past, because of what we observe when we look — in detail — at a snapshot of the Universe’s early history, from back when those neutral atoms formed for the first time.

What we learn is that there’s an upper limit to how hot the Universe ever was in its early history. And although it may have been very hot — up to energies between 10^16 and 10^17 GeV, or about 10 trillion times hotter than the Large Hadron Collider can create — that’s actually quite small compared to the scale where we’d need to talk about singularities (which is another factor of ~1000 hotter), or where quantum gravity/string theory effects would become important.
We learn this from looking at the magnitude and distribution of the temperature fluctuations in the Universe imprinted in the snapshot alluded to earlier: in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Image credit: NASA / WMAP science team; in a projection the way you'd see a globe.

(If you prefer a Mercator projection — the way you typically see a map of Earth)
What these fluctuations tell us is that, at some point in the very early history of the Universe — where we can be accurately described by this hot, dense, radiation-filled, Big Bang-esque model — the Universe was filled with small-magnitude temperature fluctuations (of a few parts in 100,000) on all measurable scales, where each scale is observed to have the same-magnitude pattern of fluctuations.

Image credit: Chiang Lung-Yih, doing a spherical harmonic decomposition of the CMB data.

As the Universe expands and cools, gravity works to pull the matter and energy in on itself, making overdensities bigger and underdensities smaller, while radiation pressure works to wash those fluctuations out. Normal matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons) interacts with photons and itself, creating “bouncy” features in this pattern of fluctuations, while dark matter can feel the radiation pressure and the gravitational tugs, but has no cross-section with either normal matter, photons or itself.
As a result, we learn what the different components of the Universe are.

Image credit: WMAP / NASA; Ned Wright of http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-DT.html.

Two important observations that come out of this are that, as far as curvature goes, the Universe is spatially flat, rather than curved positively (like a sphere) or negatively (like the seat of a saddle), and that it has the same temperature properties in all directions, even in regions that have never had an opportunity to exchange information (or transmit photons) between one another.

Images credit: horizon problem (top) via astronomynotes.com; flatness problem (bottom) by Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial.

These two things could be remarkable, finely-tuned coincidences (or, you know, just how things happen to be, for no reason), but they could also be indicative of something preceding the Big Bang. In particular, a phase of exponential expansion of the Universe — known as cosmological inflation — would compel these two things to be true. But cosmic inflation also carries a number of predictions with it: that there would be no magnetic monopoles or other leftover relics from grand unified theories, that there would be no topological defects (e.g., cosmic strings, domain walls) in the large scale structure of the Universe, and that the temperature fluctuations found in the Cosmic Microwave Background would follow a special type of distribution.

Image credit: Takeo Moroi & Tomo Takahashi, from http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0110096.

Not only do we find strong evidence against leftover relics and topological defects, but we measured this Harrison-Zel’dovich spectrum very accurately back in the 1990s, which was predicted by inflation more than a decade before it was observed! In other words, the spectrum of fluctuations is precisely consistent with what the theory of cosmological inflation predicted!
What inflation — our best scientific theory as to what preceded the Big Bang — tells us about “what came before the Big Bang” is, perhaps, very surprising.

Image generated by me, of the scale of the Universe (y-axis) vs. time (arbitrary units).

If the Universe was filled with matter (orange) or radiation (blue), as shown above, there must be a point at which these infinite temperatures and densities are reached, and thus, a singularity. But in the case of inflation (yellow), everything changes. First off, we don’t necessarily have a singularity, and we definitely don’t have one at what we traditionally think of as “the moment of the Big Bang.” Instead, we have what’s known as a past-timelike-incomplete spacetime.

Image generated by me, of the scale of the Universe (y-axis) vs. time (arbitrary units).

In other words, we not only don’t know whether there was a singularity at some point in the very distant, pre-inflation past, or whether inflation was truly eternal, we don’t even know whether inflation occurred for less than a yoctosecond or more than the present age of the (post-Big Bang) Universe!
Our prospects for finding out, furthermore, are quite dim, as — by its very nature — practically every model of cosmic inflation wipes out any information about the Universe that existed prior to the last billionth-of-a-yoctosecond before inflation ended, and our Universe began.

Image credit: Cosmic Inflation by Don Dixon.

So, before the Universe was hot, dense, expanding, cooling, and filled with matter and antimatter? There was inflation, the phase of exponential expansion that stretched the Universe flat, made it the same average temperature in all directions, wiped out any ultra-massive relic particles and topological defects, created the temperature fluctuations that led to the large-scale structure of today’s Universe, and ended 13.7 billion years ago, setting up the Big Bang that gave rise to the observable Universe we know and love. If inflation lasted any longer than that last billionth-of-a-yoctosecond that affects our observable Universe and the laws of physics we know still hold, then we almost certainly live in a multiverse as well, where our observable Universe is just one Universe out of many.

Image credit: Me, illustrating how an inflating region of spacetime's exponential properties will create new spacetime more quickly than the dynamics that end inflation can create Big Bangs and matter/radiation-filled regions of our Universe!

But what came before that? We only have theoretical possibilities, with likely no data or information from that time contained within our observable Universe to guide us. We’ll keep searching for clues, but for right now, don’t believe the hype (and I’m looking at you, Steinhardt, Turok, and Greene, among others); keep them as possibilities if you fancy them, but that speculation is no replacement for the best that science has to offer right now!

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History of Nuclear Energy

• The science of atomic radiation, atomic change and nuclear fission was developed from 1895 to 1945, much of it in the last six of those years. 
• Over 1939-45, most development was focused on the atomic bomb. 
• From 1945 attention was given to harnessing this energy in a controlled fashion for naval propulsion and for making electricity. 
• Since 1956 the prime focus has been on the technological evolution of reliable nuclear power plants. 

Exploring the nature of the atom

Uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, and named after the planet Uranus.

Ionising radiation was discovered by Wilhelm Rontgen in 1895, by passing an electric current through an evacuated glass tube and producing continuous X-rays. Then in 1896 Henri Becquerel found that pitchblende (an ore containing radium and uranium) caused a photographic plate to darken. He went on to demonstrate that this was due to beta radiation (electrons) and alpha particles (helium nuclei) being emitted. Villard found a third type of radiation from pitchblende: gamma rays, which were much the same as X-rays. Then in 1896 Pierre and Marie Curie gave the name 'radioactivity' to this phenomenon, and in 1898 isolated polonium and radium from the pitchblende. Radium was later used in medical treatment. In 1898 Samuel Prescott showed that radiation destroyed bacteria in food.

In 1902 Ernest Rutherford showed that radioactivity as a spontaneous event emitting an alpha or beta particle from the nucleus created a different element. He went on to develop a fuller understanding of atoms and in 1919 he fired alpha particles from a radium source into nitrogen and found that nuclear rearrangement was occurring, with formation of oxygen. Niels Bohr was another scientist who advanced our understanding of the atom and the way electrons were arranged around its nucleus through to the 1940s.

By 1911 Frederick Soddy discovered that naturally-radioactive elements had a number of different isotopes (radionuclides), with the same chemistry. Also in 1911, George de Hevesy showed that such radionuclides were invaluable as tracers, because minute amounts could readily be detected with simple instruments.

In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Also in 1932 Cockcroft and Walton produced nuclear transformations by bombarding atoms with accelerated protons, then in 1934 Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot found that some such transformations created artificial radionuclides. The next year Enrico Fermi found that a much greater variety of artificial radionuclides could be formed when neutrons were used instead of protons.

Fermi continued his experiments, mostly producing heavier elements from his targets, but also, with uranium, some much lighter ones.  At the end of 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin showed that the new lighter elements were barium and others which were about half the mass of uranium, thereby demonstrating that atomic fission had occurred. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, working under Niels Bohr, then explained this by suggesting that the neutron was captured by the nucleus, causing severe vibration leading to the nucleus splitting into two not quite equal parts. They calculated the energy release from this fission as about 200 million electron volts. Frisch then confirmed this figure experimentally in January 1939.

This was the first experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein's paper putting forward the equivalence between mass and energy, which had been published in 1905.

 Harnessing nuclear fission

These 1939 developments sparked activity in many laboratories. Hahn and Strassman showed that fission not only released a lot of energy but that it also released additional neutrons which could cause fission in other uranium nuclei and possibly a self-sustaining chain reaction leading to an enormous release of energy. This suggestion was soon confirmed experimentally by Joliot and his co-workers in Paris, and Leo Szilard working with Fermi in New York.


Bohr soon proposed that fission was much more likely to occur in the uranium-235 isotope than in U-238 and that fission would occur more effectively with slow-moving neutrons than with fast neutrons, the latter point being confirmed by Szilard and Fermi, who proposed using a 'moderator' to slow down the emitted neutrons. Bohr and Wheeler extended these ideas into what became the classical analysis of the fission process, and their paper was published only two days before war broke out in 1939.

Another important factor was that U-235 was then known to comprise only 0.7% of natural uranium, with the other 99.3% being U-238, with similar chemical properties. Hence the separation of the two to obtain pure U-235 would be difficult and would require the use of their very slightly different physical properties. This increase in the proportion of the U-235 isotope became known as 'enrichment'.

The remaining piece of the fission/atomic bomb concept was provided in 1939 by Francis Perrin who introduced the concept of the critical mass of uranium required to produce a self-sustaining release of energy. His theories were extended by Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham University and the resulting calculations were of considerable importance in the development of the atomic bomb. Perrin's group in Paris continued their studies and demonstrated that a chain reaction could be sustained in a uranium-water mixture (the water being used to slow down the neutrons) provided external neutrons were injected into the system. They also demonstrated the idea of introducing neutron-absorbing material to limit the multiplication of neutrons and thus control the nuclear reaction (which is the basis for the operation of a nuclear power station).

 Peierls had been a student of Werner Heisenberg, who from April 1939 presided over the German nuclear energy project under the German Ordnance Office. Initially this was directed towards military applications, but by 1942 the military objective was abandoned as impractical. However, the existence of the German Uranverein project provided the main incentive for wartime development of the atomic bomb by Britain and the USA.

Nuclear physics in Russia

Russian nuclear physics predates the Bolshevik Revolution by more than a decade. Work on radioactive minerals found in central Asia began in 1900 and the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences began a large-scale investigation in 1909. The 1917 Revolution gave a boost to scientific research and over 10 physics institutes were established in major Russian towns, particularly St Petersburg, in the years which followed. In the 1920s and early 1930s many prominent Russian physicists worked abroad, encouraged by the new regime initially as the best way to raise the level of expertise quickly. These included Kirill Sinelnikov, Pyotr Kapitsa and Vladimir Vernadsky.

By the early 1930s there were several research centres specialising in nuclear physics. Kirill Sinelnikov returned from Cambridge in 1931 to organise a department at the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute (FTI) in Kharkov which had been set up in 1928. Academician Abram Ioffe formed another group at Leningrad FTI (including the young Igor Kurchatov), which in 1933 became the Department of Nuclear Physics under Kurchatov with four separate laboratories.

By the end of the decade, there were cyclotrons installed at the Radium Institute and Leningrad FTI (the biggest in Europe). But by this time many scientists were beginning to fall victim to Stalin's purges -- half the staff of Kharkov FTI, for instance, was arrested in 1939. Nevertheless, 1940 saw great advances being made in the understanding of nuclear fission including the possibility of a chain reaction. At the urging of Kurchatov and his colleagues, the Academy of Sciences set up a "Committee for the Problem of Uranium" in June 1940 chaired by Vitaly Khlopin, and a fund was established to investigate the central Asian uranium deposits. Germany's invasion of Russia in 1941 turned much of this fundamental research to potential military applications.

Conceiving the atomic bomb

British scientists had kept pressure on their government. The refugee physicists Peierls and Frisch (who had stayed in England with Peierls after the outbreak of war), gave a major impetus to the concept of the atomic bomb in a three-page document known as the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum. In this they predicted that an amount of about 5kg of pure U-235 could make a very powerful atomic bomb equivalent to several thousand tonnes of dynamite. They also suggested how such a bomb could be detonated, how the U-235 could be produced, and what the radiation effects might be in addition to the explosive effects. They proposed thermal diffusion as a suitable method for separating the U-235 from the natural uranium. This memorandum stimulated a considerable response in Britain at a time when there was little interest in the USA.

A group of eminent scientists known as the MAUD Committee was set up in Britain and supervised research at the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool and Oxford. The chemical problems of producing gaseous compounds of uranium and pure uranium metal were studied at Birmingham University and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Dr Philip Baxter at ICI made the first small batch of gaseous uranium hexafluoride for Professor James Chadwick in 1940. ICI received a formal contract later in 1940 to make 3kg of this vital material for the future work. Most of the other research was funded by the universities themselves.

Two important developments came from the work at Cambridge. The first was experimental proof that a chain reaction could be sustained with slow neutrons in a mixture of uranium oxide and heavy water, ie. the output of neutrons was greater than the input. The second was by Bretscher and Feather based on earlier work by Halban and Kowarski soon after they arrived in Britain from Paris. When U-235 and U-238 absorb slow neutrons, the probability of fission in U-235 is much greater than in U-238. The U-238 is more likely to form a new isotope U-239, and this isotope rapidly emits an electron to become a new element with a mass of 239 and an Atomic Number of 93. This element also emits an electron and becomes a new element of mass 239 and Atomic Number 94, which has a much greater half-life. Bretscher and Feather argued on theoretical grounds that element 94 would be readily fissionable by slow and fast neutrons, and had the added advantages that it was chemically different to uranium and therefore could easily be separated from it.

This new development was also confirmed in independent work by McMillan and Abelson in the USA in 1940. Dr Kemmer of the Cambridge team proposed the names neptunium for the new element # 93 and plutonium for # 94 by analogy with the outer planets Neptune and Pluto beyond Uranus (uranium, element # 92). The Americans fortuitously suggested the same names, and the identification of plutonium in 1941 is generally credited to Glenn Seaborg.

Developing the concepts

By the end of 1940 remarkable progress had been made by the several groups of scientists coordinated by the MAUD Committee and for the expenditure of a relatively small amount of money. All of this work was kept secret, whereas in the USA several publications continued to appear in 1940 and there was also little sense of urgency.

By March 1941 one of the most uncertain pieces of information was confirmed - the fission cross-section of U-235. Peierls and Frisch had initially predicted in 1940 that almost every collision of a neutron with a U-235 atom would result in fission, and that both slow and fast neutrons would be equally effective. It was later discerned that slow neutrons were very much more effective, which was of enormous significance for nuclear reactors but fairly academic in the bomb context. Peierls then stated that there was now no doubt that the whole scheme for a bomb was feasible provided highly enriched U-235 could be obtained. The predicted critical size for a sphere of U-235 metal was about 8kg, which might be reduced by use of an appropriate material for reflecting neutrons. However, direct measurements on U-235 were still necessary and the British pushed for urgent production of a few micrograms.

The final outcome of the MAUD Committee was two summary reports in July 1941. One was on 'Use of Uranium for a Bomb' and the other was on 'Use of Uranium as a Source of Power'. The first report concluded that a bomb was feasible and that one containing some 12 kg of active material would be equivalent to 1,800 tons of TNT and would release large quantities of radioactive substances which would make places near the explosion site dangerous to humans for a long period. It estimated that a plant to produce 1kg of U-235 per day would cost ?5 million and would require a large skilled labour force that was also needed for other parts of the war effort. Suggesting that the Germans could also be working on the bomb, it recommended that the work should be continued with high priority in cooperation with the Americans, even though they seemed to be concentrating on the future use of uranium for power and naval propulsion.

The second MAUD Report concluded that the controlled fission of uranium could be used to provide energy in the form of heat for use in machines, as well as providing large quantities of radioisotopes which could be used as substitutes for radium. It referred to the use of heavy water and possibly graphite as moderators for the fast neutrons, and that even ordinary water could be used if the uranium was enriched in the U-235 isotope. It concluded that the 'uranium boiler' had considerable promise for future peaceful uses but that it was not worth considering during the present war. The Committee recommended that Halban and Kowarski should move to the USA where there were plans to make heavy water on a large scale. The possibility that the new element plutonium might be more suitable than U-235 was mentioned, so that the work in this area by Bretscher and Feather should be continued in Britain.

The two reports led to a complete reorganisation of work on the bomb and the 'boiler'. It was claimed that the work of the committee had put the British in the lead and that "in its fifteen months' existence it had proved itself one of the most effective scientific committees that ever existed". The basic decision that the bomb project would be pursued urgently was taken by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, with the agreement of the Chiefs of Staff.

The reports also led to high level reviews in the USA, particularly by a Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, initially concentrating on the nuclear power aspect. Little emphasis was given to the bomb concept until 7 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and the Americans entered the war directly. The huge resources of the USA were then applied without reservation to developing atomic bombs.

The Manhattan Project

The Americans increased their effort rapidly and soon outstripped the British. Research continued in each country with some exchange of information. Several of the key British scientists visited the USA early in 1942 and were given full access to all of the information available. The Americans were pursuing three enrichment processes in parallel: Professor Lawrence was studying electromagnetic separation at Berkeley (University of California), E. V. Murphree of Standard Oil was studying the centrifuge method developed by Professor Beams, and Professor Urey was coordinating the gaseous diffusion work at Columbia University. Responsibility for building a reactor to produce fissile plutonium was given to Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago. The British were only examining gaseous diffusion.

In June 1942 the US Army took over process development, engineering design, procurement of materials and site selection for pilot plants for four methods of making fissionable material (because none of the four had been shown to be clearly superior at that point) as well as the production of heavy water. With this change, information flow to Britain dried up. This was a major setback to the British and the Canadians who had been collaborating on heavy water production and on several aspects of the research program. Thereafter, Churchill sought information on the cost of building a diffusion plant, a heavy water plant and an atomic reactor in Britain.

After many months of negotiations an agreement was finally signed by Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt in Quebec in August 1943, according to which the British handed over all of their reports to the Americans and in return received copies of General Groves' progress reports to the President. The latter showed that the entire US program would cost over $1,000 million, all for the bomb, as no work was being done on other applications of nuclear energy.

Construction of production plants for electromagnetic separation (in calutrons) and gaseous diffusion was
well under way. An experimental graphite pile constructed by Fermi had operated at the University of Chicago in December 1942 ?the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
A full-scale production reactor for plutonium was being constructed at Argonne, with further ones at Oak Ridge and then Hanford, plus a reprocessing plant to extract the plutonium. Four plants for heavy water production were being built, one in Canada and three in the USA. A team under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico was working on the design and construction of both U-235 and Pu-239 bombs. The outcome of the huge effort, with assistance from the British teams, was that sufficient Pu-239 and highly enriched U-235 (from calutrons and diffusion at Oak Ridge) was produced by mid-1945. The uranium mostly originated from the Belgian Congo.

The first atomic device tested successfully at Alamagordo in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. It used plutonium made in a nuclear pile. The teams did not consider that it was necessary to test a simpler U-235 device. The first atomic bomb, which contained U-235, was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The second bomb, containing Pu-239, was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August. That same day, the USSR declared war on Japan. On 10 August 1945 the Japanese Government surrendered.

The Soviet bomb

Initially Stalin was not enthusiastic about diverting resources to develop an atomic bomb, until intelligence reports suggested that such research was under way in Germany, Britain and the USA. Consultations with Academicians Ioffe, Kapitsa, Khlopin and Vernadsky convinced him that a bomb could be developed relatively quickly and he initiated a modest research program in 1942. Igor Kurchatov, then relatively young and unknown, was chosen to head it and in 1943 he became Director of Laboratory No.2 recently established on the outskirts of Moscow. This was later renamed LIPAN, then became the Kurchatov
Institute of Atomic Energy. Overall responsibility for the bomb program rested with Security Chief Lavrenti Beria and its administration was undertaken by the First Main Directorate (later called the Ministry of Medium Machine Building).

Research had three main aims: to achieve a controlled chain reaction; to investigate methods of isotope separation; and to look at designs for both enriched uranium and plutonium bombs. Attempts were made to initiate a chain reaction using two different types of atomic pile: one with graphite as a moderator and the other with heavy water. Three possible methods of isotope separation were studied: counter-current thermal diffusion, gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945, German scientists were "recruited" to the bomb program to work in particular on isotope separation to produce enriched uranium. This included research into gas centrifuge technology in addition to the three other enrichment technologies.

The test of the first US atomic bomb in July 1945 had little impact on the Soviet effort, but by this time, Kurchatov was making good progress towards both a uranium and a plutonium bomb. He had begun to design an industrial scale reactor for the production of plutonium, while those scientists working on uranium isotope separation were making advances with the gaseous diffusion method.

It was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month which gave the program a high profile and construction began in November 1945 of a new city in the Urals which would house the first plutonium production reactors -- Chelyabinsk-40 (Later known as Chelyabinsk-65 or the Mayak production association). This was the first of ten secret nuclear cities to be built in the Soviet Union. The first of five reactors at Chelyabinsk-65 came on line in 1948. This town also housed a processing plant for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium.

As for uranium enrichment technology, it was decided in late 1945 to begin construction of the first gaseous diffusion plant at Verkh-Neyvinsk (later the closed city of Sverdlovsk-44), some 50 kilometres from Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) in the Urals. Special design bureaux were set up at the Leningrad Kirov Metallurgical and Machine-Building Plant and at the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) Machine Building Plant. Support was provided by a group of German scientists working at the Sukhumi Physical Technical Institute.

In April 1946 design work on the bomb was shifted to Design Bureau-11 -- a new centre at Sarova some 400 kilometres from Moscow (subsequently the closed city of Arzamas-16). More specialists were brought in to the program including metallurgist Yefim Slavsky who was given the immediate task of producing the very pure graphite Kurchatov needed for his plutonium production pile constructed at Laboratory No. 2 known as F-1. The pile was operated for the first time in December 1946. Support was also given by Laboratory No.3 in Moscow -- now the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics -- which had been working on nuclear reactors.

Work at Arzamas-16 was influenced by foreign intelligence gathering and the first device was based closely on the Nagasaki bomb (a plutonium device). In August 1947 a test site was established near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and was ready for the detonation two years later of the first bomb, RSD-1. Even before this was tested in August 1949, another group of scientists led by Igor Tamm and including Andrei Sakharov had begun work on a hydrogen bomb.

Revival of the 'nuclear boiler'

By the end of World War II, the project predicted and described in detail only five and a half years before in the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum had been brought to partial fruition, and attention could turn to the peaceful and directly beneficial application of nuclear energy. Post-war, weapons development continued on both sides of the "iron curtain", but a new focus was on harnessing the great atomic power, now dramatically (if tragically) demonstrated, for making steam and electricity.

In the course of developing nuclear weapons the Soviet Union and the West had acquired a range of new technologies and scientists realised that the tremendous heat produced in the process could be tapped either for direct use or for generating electricity. It was also clear that this new form of energy would allow development of compact long-lasting power sources which could have various applications, not least for shipping, and especially in submarines.

The first nuclear reactor to produce electricity (albeit a trivial amount) was the small Experimental Breeder reactor (EBR-1) designed and operated by Argonne National Laboratory and sited in Idaho, USA. The reactor started up in December 1951.

In 1953 President Eisenhower proposed his "Atoms for Peace" program, which reoriented significant research effort towards electricity generation and set the course for civil nuclear energy development in the USA.

In the Soviet Union, work was under way at various centres to refine existing reactor designs and develop new ones.  The Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (FEI) was set up in May 1946 at the then-closed city of Obninsk, 100 km southwest of Moscow, to develop nuclear power technology. The existing graphite-moderated channel-type plutonium production reactor was modified for heat and electricity generation and in June 1954 the world's first nuclear powered electricity generator began operation at the FEI in Obninsk. The AM-1 (Atom Mirny -- peaceful atom) reactor was water-cooled and graphite-moderated, with a design capacity of 30 MWt or 5 MWe. It was similar in principle to the plutonium production reactors in the closed military cities and served as a prototype for other graphite channel reactor designs including the Chernobyl-type RBMK (reaktor bolshoi moshchnosty kanalny -- high power channel reactor) reactors. AM-1 produced electricity until 1959 and was used until 2000 as a research facility and for the production of isotopes.

Also in the 1950s FEI at Obninsk was developing fast breeder reactors (FBRs) and lead-bismuth reactors for the navy. In April 1955 the BR-1 (bystry reaktor -- fast reactor) fast neutron reactor began operating. It produced no power but led directly to the BR-5 which started up in 1959 with a capacity of 5MWt which was used to do the basic research necessary for designing sodium-cooled FBRs. It was upgraded and modernised in 1973 and then underwent major reconstruction in 1983 to become the BR-10 with a capacity of 8 MWt which is now used to investigate fuel endurance, to study materials and to produce isotopes.

The main US effort was under Admiral Hyman Rickover, which developed the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) for naval (particularly submarine) use. The PWR used enriched uranium oxide fuel and was moderated and cooled by ordinary (light) water. The Mark 1 prototype naval reactor started up in March 1953 in Idaho, and the first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, was launched in 1954. In 1959 both USA and USSR launched their first nuclear-powered surface vessels.

The Mark 1 reactor led to the US Atomic Energy Commission building the 60 MWe Shippingport demonstration PWR reactor in Pennsylvania, which started up in 1957 and operated until 1982.
Since the USA had a virtual monopoly on uranium enrichment in the West, British development took a different tack and resulted in a series of reactors fuelled by natural uranium metal, moderated by graphite, and gas-cooled. The first of these 50 MWe Magnox types, Calder Hall-1, started up in 1956 and ran until 2003. However, after 1963 (and 26 units) no more were commenced. Britain next embraced the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (using enriched oxide fuel) before conceding the pragmatic virtues of the PWR design.

Nuclear energy goes commercial

In the USA, Westinghouse designed the first fully commercial PWR of 250 MWe, Yankee Rowe, which started up in 1960 and operated to 1992. Meanwhile the boiling water reactor (BWR) was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory, and the first one, Dresden-1 of 250 MWe, designed by General Electric, was started up earlier in 1960. A prototype BWR, Vallecitos, ran from 1957 to 1963. By the end of the 1960s, orders were being placed for PWR and BWR reactor units of more than 1000 MWe.

Canadian reactor development headed down a quite different track, using natural uranium fuel and heavy water as a moderator and coolant. The first unit started up in 1962. This CANDU design continues to be refined.

France started out with a gas-graphite design similar to Magnox and the first reactor started up in 1956. Commercial models operated from 1959. It then settled on three successive generations of standardised PWRs, which was a very cost-effective strategy.

In 1964 the first two Soviet nuclear power plants were commissioned. A 100 MW boiling water graphite channel reactor began operating in Beloyarsk (Urals). In Novovoronezh (Volga region) a new design -- a small (210 MW) pressurised water reactor (PWR) known as a VVER (veda-vodyanoi energetichesky reaktor -- water cooled power reactor) was built.

The first large RBMK (1,000 MW - high-power channel reactor) started up at Sosnovy Bor near Leningrad in 1973 and in the Arctic northwest a VVER with a rated capacity of 440 MW began operating. This was superseded by a 1000 MWe version which became a standard design.

In Kazakhstan the world's first commercial prototype fast neutron reactor (the BN-350) started up in 1972, producing 120 MW of electricity and heat to desalinate Caspian seawater. In the USA, UK, France and
Russia a number of experimental fast neutron reactors produced electricity from 1959, the last of these closing in 2009. This left Russia's BN-600 as the only commercial fast reactor.

Around the world, with few exceptions, other countries have chosen light-water designs for their nuclear power programs, so that today 60% of the world capacity is PWR and 21% BWR.

 The nuclear power brown-out

From the late 1970s to about 2002 the nuclear power industry suffered some decline and stagnation. Few new reactors were ordered, the number coming on line from mid 1980s little more than matched retirements, though capacity increased by nearly one third and output increased 60% due to capacity plus improved load factors. The share of nuclear in world electricity from mid 1980s was fairly constant at 16-17%. Many reactor orders from the 1970s were cancelled. The uranium price dropped accordingly, and also because of an increase in secondary supplies. Oil companies which had entered the uranium field bailed out, and there was a consolidation of uranium producers.

However, by the late 1990s the first of the third-generation reactors was commissioned - Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6 - a 1350 MWe Advanced BWR, in Japan. This was a sign of the recovery to come.

Nuclear renaissance

In the new century several factors have combined to revive the prospects for nuclear power. First is realisation of the scale of projected increased electricity demand worldwide, but particularly in rapidly-developing countries. Secondly is awareness of the importance of energy security, and thirdly is the need to limit carbon emissions due to concern about global warming.

These factors coincide with the availability of a new generation of nuclear power reactors, and in 2004 the first of the late third-generation units was ordered for Finland - a 1600 MWe European PWR (EPR). A similar unit is planned for France as the first of a full fleet replacement there. In the USA the 2005 Energy Policy Act provided incentives for establishing new-generation power reactors there.

But plans in Europe and North America are overshadowed by those in China, India, Japan and South Korea. China alone plans a sixfold increase in nuclear power capacity by 2020, and has more than one hundred further large units proposed and backed by credible political determination and popular support. A large portion of these are the latest western design, expedited by modular construction.

The history of nuclear power thus starts with science in Europe, blossoms in UK and USA with the latter's technological might, languishes for a few decades, then has a new growth spurt in east Asia.

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History of Basketball

 

History of Basketball

Basketball was invented in December 1891 by the Canadian clergyman, educator, and physician James Naismith. Naismith introduced the game when we was an instructor at the Young Men's Christian Association Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts. At the request of his superior, Dr. Luther H. Gulick, he organized a vigorous recreation suitable for indoor winter play. The game involved elements of American football, soccer, and hockey, and the first ball used was a soccer ball. Teams had nine players, and the goals were wooden peach baskets affixed to the walls. By 1897-1898, teams of five became standard. The game rapidly spread nationwide and to Canada and other parts of the world, played by both women and men; it also became a popular informal outdoor game. U.S. servicemen in World War II (1939-1945) popularized the sport in many other countries.

A number of U.S. colleges adopted the game between about 1893 and 1895. In 1934 the first college games were staged in New York City's Madison Square Garden, and college basketball began to attract heightened interest. By the 1950s basketball had become a major college sport, thus paving the way for a growth of interest in professional basketball.

The first pro league, the National Basketball League, was formed in 1898 to protect players from exploitation and to promote a less rough game. This league only lasted five years before disbanding; its demise spawned a number of loosely organized leagues throughout the northeastern United States. One of the first and greatest pro teams was the Original Celtics, organized about 1915 in New York City. They played as many as 150 games a season and dominated basketball until 1936. The Harlem Globetrotters, founded in 1927, a notable exhibition team, specializes in amusing court antics and expert ball handling.

In 1949 two subsequent professional leagues, the National Basketball League (formed in 1937) and the Basketball Association of America (1946) merged to create the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Boston Celtics, led by their center Bill Russell, dominated the NBA from the late 1950s through the 1960s. By the 1960s, pro teams from coast to coast played before crowds of many millions annually. Wilt Chamberlain, a center for the Los Angeles Lakers, was another leading player during the era, and his battles with Russell were eagerly anticipated. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, also a center, came to prominence during the 1970s. Jabbar perfected his famed "sky hook" shot while playing for the Los Angeles Lakers and dominated the opposition.

The NBA suffered a drop in popularity during the late 1970s, but was resuscitated, principally through the growing popularity of its most prominent players. Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics, and Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers are credited with injecting excitement into the league in the 1980s through their superior skills and decade-long rivalry. During the late 1980s Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls rose to stardom and helped the Bulls dominate the NBA during the early 1990s. A new generation of basketball stars, including Shaquille O'Neal of the Orlando Magic and Larry Johnson of the Charlotte Hornets, have sustained the NBA's growth in popularity.

In 1959 a Basketball Hall of Fame was founded in Springfield, Massachusetts. Its rosters include the names of great players, coaches, referees, and people who have contributed significantly to the development of the game.

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History Of Golf

 

Origins

A golf-like game is recorded as taking place on 26 February 1297, in the Netherlands, in a city called Loenen aan de Vecht, where the Dutch played a game with a stick and leather ball. The winner was whoever hit the ball with the least number of strokes into a target several hundred yards away. Some scholars argue that this game of putting a small ball in a hole in the ground using golf clubs was also played in 17th-century Netherlands and that this predates the game in Scotland. There are also other reports of earlier accounts of a golf-like game from continental Europe.

In April 2005, new evidence re-invigorated the debate concerning the origins of golf. Recent evidence unearthed by Prof. Ling Hongling of Lanzhou University suggests that a game similar to modern-day golf was played in China since Southern Tang Dynasty, 500 years before golf was first mentioned in Scotland.
Dōngxuān Records (Chinese: 東軒錄) from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) describes a game called chuíwán (捶丸) and also includes drawings of the game.It was played with 10 clubs including a cuanbang, pubang, and shaobang, which are comparable to a driver, two-wood, and three-wood. Clubs were inlaid with jade and gold, suggesting chuíwán was for the wealthy. Chinese archive includes references to a Southern Tang official who asked his daughter to dig holes as a target. Ling suggested chuíwán was exported to Europe and then Scotland by Mongolian travellers in the late Middle Ages.

Early golf in Scotland

The modern game of golf is generally considered to be a Scottish invention. A spokesman for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, one of the oldest Scottish golf organisations, said "Stick and ball games have been around for many centuries, but golf as we know it today, played over 18 holes, clearly originated in Scotland.". The word golf, or in Scots gouf, is usually thought to be a Scots alteration of Dutch "colf" or "colve" meaning "stick, "club", "bat", itself related to the Proto-Germanic language *kulth- as found in Old Norse kolfr meaning "bell clapper", and the German Kolben meaning "mace or club". The Dutch term Kolven refers to a related sport.

The first documented mention of golf in Scotland appears in a 1457 Act of the Scottish Parliament, an edict issued by king James II of Scotland prohibiting the playing of the games of gowf and football as these were a distraction from archery practice for military purposes. Bans were again imposed in Acts of 1471 and 1491, with golf being described as "an unprofitable sport". Mary, Queen of Scots, was accused by her political enemies of playing golf, after her second husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was murdered in 1567. George Buchanan subsequently wrote that she had been playing "sports that were clearly unsuitable to women". Golf was banned again by parliament under king James IV of Scotland, but golf clubs and balls were bought for him in 1502 when he was visiting Perth, and on subsequent occasions when he was in St Andrews and Edinburgh.

The account book of lawyer Sir John Foulis of Ravelston records that he played golf at Musselburgh Links on 2 March 1672, and this has been accepted as proving that The Old Links, Musselburgh, is the oldest playing golf course in the world. There is also a story that Mary, Queen of Scots, played there in  

1567.Instructions, golf club rules and competitions

The earliest known instructions for playing golf have been found in the diary of Thomas Kincaid, a medical student who played on the course at Bruntsfield Links, near Edinburgh University, and at Leith Links. His notes include his views on an early handicap system. In his entry for 20 January 1687 he noted how "After dinner I went out to the Golve", and described his Golf stroke:

    I found that the only way of playing at the Golve is to stand as you do at fenceing with the small sword bending your legs a little and holding the muscles of your legs and back and armes exceeding bent or fixt or stiffe and not at all slackning them in the time you are bringing down the stroak (which you readily doe) ....[7]

The oldest surviving rules of golf were written in 1744 for the Company of Gentlemen Golfers, later renamed The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, which played at Leith Links. Their "Articles and Laws in Playing at Golf, now preserved in the National Library of Scotland, became known as the Leith Rules and the document supports the club's claim to be the oldest golf club, though an almanac published about a century later is the first record of a rival claim that The Royal Burgess Golfing Society had been set up in 1735. The instructions in the Leith Rules formed the basis for all subsequent codes, for example requiring that "Your Tee must be upon the ground" and "You are not to change the Ball which you strike off the Tee".[7]

The 1744 competition for the Gentlemen Golfers’ Competition for the Silver Club, a trophy in the form of a silver golf club provided as sponsorship by Edinburgh Town Council, was won by surgeon John Rattray, who was required to attach to the trophy a silver ball engraved with his name, beginning a long tradition. Rattray joined the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and as a result was imprisoned in Inverness, but was saved from being hanged by the pleading of his fellow golfer Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session. Rattray was released in 1747, and won the Silver Club three times in total.[7]

The spread of golf

Early excursions

In 1603 James VI of Scotland succeeded to the throne of England. His son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales and his courtiers played golf at Blackheath, London, from which the Royal Blackheath Golf Club traces its origins.[10] There is evidence that Scottish soldiers, expatriates and immigrants took the game to British colonies and elsewhere during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Royal Calcutta Golf Club (1829)[11] and the club at Pau (1856)[12] in south western France are notable reminders of these excursions and are the oldest golf clubs outside of the British Isles and the oldest in continental Europe respectively. However, it was not until the late 19th century that Golf became more widely popular outside of its Scottish home.

The late 19th-century boom

In the 1850s Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands.[13] The railways came to St Andrews in 1852.[14] By the 1860s there were fast and regular services from London to Edinburgh. The royal enthusiasm for Scotland, the much improved transport links and the writings of Sir Walter Scott caused a boom for tourism in Scotland and a wider interest in Scottish history and culture outside of the country.[15][16][17] This period also coincided with the development of the Gutty; a golf ball made of Gutta Percha which was cheaper to mass produce, more durable and more consistent in quality and performance than the feather-filled leather balls used previously.[18] Golf began to spread across the rest of the British Isles. In 1864 the golf course at the resort of Westward Ho! became the first new course in England since Blackheath.[19] In 1880 England had 12 courses, rising to 50 in 1887 and over 1000 by 1914.[20] The game in England had progressed sufficiently by 1890 to produce its first Open Champion, John Ball. The game also spread further across the empire. By the 1880s golf clubs had been established in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Singapore followed in 1891. Courses were also established in several continental European resorts for the benefit of British visitors.

United States of America

Evidence of early golf in the United States includes an advertisement published in the Royal Gazette of New York City in 1779 for golf clubs and balls,[21] and the notice of the annual general meeting for a golf club in Savannah published in the Georgia Gazette in 1796.[22] However, as in England, it was not until the late 19th century that golf started to become firmly established. Although there are several competing claims to being the oldest club, what is not contested is that in 1894 delegates from the Newport Country Club, Saint Andrew's Golf Club, Yonkers, New York, The Country Club, Chicago Golf Club, and Shinnecock Hills Golf Club met in New York City to form what was to become the United States Golf Association (USGA). By 1910 there were 267 clubs. During the Roaring Twenties the game expanded greatly in popularity and by 1932 there were over 1,100 golf clubs affiliated to the USGA. In 1922 Walter Hagen became the first native born American to win the British Open Championship, signalling the USA's dominance of the game that has yet to be seriously challenged. The expansion of the game was halted by the Great Depression and World War II, but continued in the post war years. By 1980 there were over 5,000 USGA affiliated clubs, and today the total exceeds 10,600.[23]

Japan

After the Meiji restoration of 1868 Japan made a concerted effort to modernise its economy and industry on western lines. Japanese came to Europe and America to establish trade links and study and acquire the latest developments in business, science and technology, and westerners came to Japan to help establish schools, factories, shipyards and banks.

In 1903 a group of British expatriates established the first golf club in Japan, at Kobe.[24] In 1913 the Tokyo Golf club at Komazawa was established for and by native Japanese who had encountered golf in the United States. In 1924 The Japan Golf Association was established by the seven clubs then in existence.[25] During the 1920s and early 30's several new courses were built, however the great depression and increasing anti-Western sentiment limited the growth of the game. By the time of the Japanese attacks against the USA and British Empire in 1941 there were 23 courses.[26] During the subsequent war most of the courses were requisitioned for military use or returned to agricultural production.[24]

In the postwar period, Japan's golf courses came under the control of the occupying forces. It was not until 1952 that courses started to be returned to Japanese control.[24] By 1956 there were 72 courses[26] and in 1957 Torakichi Nakamura and Koichi Ono won the Canada Cup (now World Cup) in Japan, an event that is often cited as igniting the post-war golf boom.[27] Between 1960 and 1964 the number of golf courses in Japan increased from 195 to 424. By the early 1970s there were over 1,000 courses. The 1987 Resort Law that reduced protection on agricultural land and forest preserves created a further boom in course construction[26] and by 2009 there were over 2,400 courses.[28] The popularity of golf in Japan also caused many golf resorts to be created across the Pacific Rim.[29] The environmental effect of these recent golf booms is seen as a cause for concern by many.

Golf course evolution

Golf courses have not always had eighteen holes. The St Andrews Links occupy a narrow strip of land along the sea. As early as the 15th century, golfers at St Andrews established a trench through the undulating terrain, playing to holes whose locations were dictated by topography. The course that emerged featured eleven holes, laid out end to end from the clubhouse to the far end of the property. One played the holes out, turned around, and played the holes in, for a total of 22 holes. In 1764, several of the holes were deemed too short, and were therefore combined. The number was thereby reduced from 11 to nine, so that a complete round of the links comprised 18 holes. Due to the status of St Andrews as the golfing capital, all other courses followed suit and the 18 hole course remains the standard to the present day.

Equipment development

The evolution of golf can be explained by the development of the equipment used to play the game. Some of the most notable advancements in the game of golf have come from the development of the golf ball. The golf ball took on many different forms before the 1930s when the United States Golf Association (USGA) set standards for weight and size.[31] These standards were later followed by a USGA regulation stating that the initial velocity of any golf ball cannot exceed 250 feet per second. Since this time, the golf ball has continued to develop and impact the way the game is played.

Another notable factor in the evolution of golf has been the development of golf clubs. The earliest golf clubs were made of wood that was readily available in the area. Over the years, Hickory developed into the standard wood used for shafts and American Persimmon became the choice of wood for the club head due to its hardness and strength. As the golf ball developed and became more durable with the introduction of the “gutty” around 1850, the club head was also allowed to develop, and a variety of iron headed clubs entered the game. The introduction of steel shafts began in the late 1890s, but their adoption by the governing bodies of golf was slow. In the early 1970s, shaft technology shifted again with the use of graphite for its lightweight and strength characteristics. The first metal “wood” was developed in the early 1980s, and metal eventually completely replaced wood due to its strength and versatility.[32] The latest golf club technology employs the use of graphite shafts and lightweight titanium heads, which allows the club head to be made much larger than previously possible. The strength of these modern materials also allows the face of the club to be much thinner, which increases the spring-like effect of the club face on the ball, theoretically increasing the distance the ball travels. The USGA has recently limited the spring-like effect, also known as the Coefficient of Restitution (COR) to .83 and the maximum club head size to 460cc in an attempt to maintain the challenge of the game.[33]

Etymology

The word golf was first mentioned in writing in 1457 on a Scottish statute on forbidden games as gouf,[34] possibly derived from the Scots word goulf (variously spelled) meaning "to strike or cuff". This word may, in turn, be derived from the Dutch word kolf, meaning "bat," or "club," and the Dutch sport of the same name. But there is an even earlier reference to the game of golf, and it is believed to have happened in 1452 when King James II banned the game because it kept his subjects from their archery practice.[35]

There is a persistent urban legend claiming that the term derives from an acronym "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden". This is a false etymology, as acronyms being used as words is a fairly modern phenomenon, making the expression a backronym.[36]

Museums

The history of golf is preserved and represented at several golf museums around the world, notably the British Golf Museum in the town of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, which is the home of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, and the United States Golf Association Museum and Arnold Mongool Center for Golf History, located alongside the United States Golf Association headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey.

The World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Florida also presents a history of the sport, as does the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in Oakville, Ontario.

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