Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military...

Walther Wenck (18 September 1900 – 1 May 1982) was the youngest general in the German Army and a highly experienced staff officer during World War II. At the end of the war, he commanded the German Twelfth Army that took part in the Battle of Berlin. He was known during the war as "The Boy General". == Early life == Wenck was born in Wittenberg, Germany. Prior to joining the Army (Reichswehr) of the Weimar Republic in 1920, he was a member of the Free Corps (Freikorps) in 1919. == World War II == From 1939 to 1942, Wenck was Chief of Operations for the 1st Panzer Division. In 1942, he w...

On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, perpetrated by Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The name Operation Valkyrie, originally referring to a component part of the conspirators' overall plot, has become associated with the event. The apparent purpose of the assassination attempt was to seize political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) in order to obtain peace with the western Allies as soon as possible. The underlying...

Raoult's law is a law of thermodynamics established by French chemist François-Marie Raoult in 1882. It states that the partial vapor pressure of each component of an ideal mixture of liquids is equal to the vapor pressure of the pure component multiplied by its mole fraction in the mixture. Mathematically, Raoult's law for a single component in an ideal solution is stated as p i = p i ⋆ x ...

In particle physics, the weak interaction, the weak force or weak nuclear force, is one of the four known fundamental interactions of nature, alongside the strong interaction, electromagnetism, and gravitation. The weak interaction is responsible for radioactive decay, which plays an essential role in nuclear fission. The theory of the weak interaction is sometimes called quantum flavordynamics (QFD), in analogy with the terms QCD and QED, but the term is rarely used because the weak force is best understood in terms of electro-weak theory (EWT). In the Standard Model of particle physics, the weak...

In physics, the exchange interaction (with an exchange energy, and exchange term) is a quantum mechanical effect that only occurs between identical particles. Despite sometimes being called an exchange force in analogy to classical force, it is not a true force, as it lacks a force carrier. The effect is due to the wave function of indistinguishable particles being subject to exchange symmetry, that is, either remaining unchanged (symmetric) or changing its sign (antisymmetric) when two particles are exchanged. Both bosons and fermions can experience the exchange interaction. For fermions, it is...

In chemical bonding theory, an antibonding orbital is a type of molecular orbital that, if occupied by electrons, weakens the bond between two atoms and helps to raise the energy of the molecule relative to the separated atoms. Such an orbital has one or more nodes in the bonding region between the nuclei. The density of the electrons in the orbital is concentrated outside the bonding region and acts to pull one nucleus away from the other and tends to cause mutual repulsion between the two atoms. == Diatomic molecules == Antibonding molecular orbitals (MOs) are normally higher in energy ...

The charge-shift bond has been proposed as a new class of chemical bond that sits alongside the two familiar families of covalent and ionic bonds where electrons are shared or transferred respectively. The charge shift bond derives its stability from the resonance of ionic forms rather than the covalent sharing of electrons which are often depicted as having electron density between the bonded atoms. A feature of the charge shift bond is that the predicted electron density between the bonded atoms is low. It has long been known from experiment that the accumulation of electronic charge between...

Degenerate matter in physics is a collection of free, non-interacting particles with a pressure and other physical characteristics determined by quantum mechanical effects. It is the analogue of an ideal gas in classical mechanics. The degenerate state of matter, insofar as it deviates from an ideal gas, arises at extraordinarily high density (in compact stars) or at extremely low temperatures in laboratories. It occurs for matter particles such as electrons, neutrons, protons, and fermions in general and is referred to as electron-degenerate matter, neutron-degenerate matter, etc. In a mixture...