Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

ISBN-13: 9780195173246 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 512 str.

William H. Cropper

Opis

Here is a lively history of modern physics, as seen through the lives of thirty men and women from the pantheon of physics. William H. Cropper vividly portrays the life and accomplishments of such giants as Galileo and Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, right up to contemporary figures such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Stephen Hawking. We meet scientists--all geniuses--who could be gregarious, aloof, unpretentious, friendly, dogged, imperious, generous to colleagues or contentious rivals. As Cropper captures their personalities, he also offers vivid portraits of their great moments of discovery, their bitter feuds, their relations with family and friends, their religious beliefs and education. In addition, Cropper has grouped these biographies by discipline--mechanics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and others--each section beginning with a historical overview. Thus in the section on quantum mechanics, readers can see how the work of Max Planck influenced Niels Bohr, and how Bohr in turn influenced Werner Heisenberg.
Our understanding of the physical world has increased dramatically in the last four centuries. With Great Physicists, readers can retrace the footsteps of the men and women who led the way.

Recenzje

"This book provides encapsulated histories of 30 physicists who have made major contributions to the development of physics over the last five centuries, from Galileo to Hawking. ... This has the wonderful effect of laying out the development of physics in an exciting continuous stream, interweaving the social and scientific lives of all the scientists very effectively. The individual chapters are scholarly yet brief, concise and to the point, focusing on the crucial life events and the major scientific breakthroughs. ... We need something like this for mathematics now!"--Mathematical Reviews

O autorze

William H. Cropper is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University. He lives in Saugerties, New York.