FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
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fundamental organic chemistry, von Baeyer and his assistants also synthe–
sized the first aniline dyes and pharmaceuticals, which laid the foundation
for the German chemical industry. By the beginning of the twentieth cen–
tury, the success of universi ty-based laboratories in fos tering basic as well
as applied science had led to the establishment of non-teaching research
laboratories run by professional scientists who were not, or were no
longer, academics.
At first, physics didn't seem to lend itself to the novel factory-style
laboratory research mode. Relatively simple, home-made equipment still
sufficed for doing incisive physical experiments, and there seemed to be
little profit for master-physicists in farming out detail work to assistants.
That si tuation changed, however, in the early years of the twentieth cen–
tury, when Ernest Rutherford established a laboratory for research in
atomic physics, first at Manchester University and later in the University
of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. As master-minded by Rutherford,
atomic physics resorted to ever-more complex and expensive equipment
and ever-larger research teams, eventually culminating in the mega-labo–
ratories of the Manhattan District Project that arose during World War II.
Rutherford's students comprised a brilliant crew, including James
Chadwick (the discoverer of the neutron); Hans Geiger (the eponymous
inventor of the first atomic particle counter); Henry Moseley (who orig–
inated the concept of atomic numbering that brought Mendeleev's table
of the elements into conformance with atomic structure and who was said
to have been the most brilliant of Rutherford's brilliant young men);
Georg von Hevesy (inventor of radioactive tracer );John Cockroft (inven–
tor of the first atom-smashing particle accelerator); and Niels Bohr (who
devised the quantum-theoretical model of the atom).
In the late 1920s, Bohr established his own institute for atomic stud–
ies at the Universi ty of Copenhagen. It became the focus of the revolution
in our understanding of nature set off by the development of quantum
mechanics, which raised philosophical doubts about the nature of physical
reality at the atomic level. Bohr's star disciples included Werner
Heisenberg, the co-inventor of quantum mechanics; Paul Dirac, the dis–
coverer of the electron's positively charged twin, the positron; and
Wolfgang Pauli, who formulated the quantum-mechanical exclusion prin–
ciple, which states that at any particular energy level, an atom can have
only two electrons, one spinning clockwise and the other counterclock–
WIse.
Bohr was one of the master scientists whose influence extended far
beyond their own laboratories and disciples, and functioned as arbiters of
quality for entire disciplines. They held sway over their colleagues, not so
much by virtue of the temporal power derived from appointments,
