In a delightful reminiscence titled “How my brother and I became interested in dislocations“, W G Burgers recounts the history of the discovery of Burgers dislocations (or, screw dislocations). According to W G Burgers, it is his brother J M Burgers (who supplies an addendum to the article), who is the father of the Burgers vector; this in turn makes W G Burgers the uncle of the vector. Here is the wiki page on dislocation; for those of you who are technically minded, here is an e-book on defects in crystals that the wiki page refers to.
While you are at it, you might want to take a look at the entire Proceedings of Royal Society Volume which is the proceedings of a symposium on The beginnings of solid state physics; it consists of articles by Bloch, Peierls, Bethe, Mott, Herring, Bardeen, Seitz, Smoluchowski, Burgers, Nabarro, Frank, Cottrell, Hirsch, and Seeger, among many others. Looking through the volume, you might also be able to download some dislocation classics — these papers by Taylor, for example. If I remember correct, The Coming of Materials Science of Prof. R W Cahn refers to some of these articles of the Royal Society Proceedings (and gives a nice gist too). Since the Royal Society archives will be open for public only till the end of this month, hurry!
June 10, 2009 at 1:36 pm |
[...] credit being given to Read and Shockley with Burgers and Bragg being the precursors. By the way, this Burgers is the father and not the uncle of dislocations! The transition lattice models of [...]