Springer, 2009. - 340 p. Wolfgang Pauli was not only one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century: His huge correspondence and unpublished manuscripts also demonstrate his deep interest in questions beyond physics. This volume explores the relevance of Pauli's visionary ideas with respect to several topics in science and philosophy that are of great contemporary...
IOP Publishing, 2001. — 639 p. Schonland: Scientist and Soldier is a biography of Sir Basil Schonland FRS (1896-1972). Schonland the physicist unravelled the mysteries of lightning. Schonland the soldier served as scientific advisor to two Generals, became Chancellor of his alma mater, and Superintendent of the Army Operational Research Group. Schonland the administrator was...
Springer, 1998. — 318 p. The contributors to this book explore the striking anticipations of philosophy of science of our twentieth century in the works of Hertz, in his laboratory physics and in his epistemological reflections. And they investigate Hertz through his great influence upon the history of physics. Preface (by Robert S. Cohen). Editorial Note. Hertz, Helmholtz and...
Springer, 1995. - 266 p. This book gives the first detailed record of Ludwig Boltzmann's life and philosophical thoughts during his final years, a period of major change in physics, needing a new methodology of theoretical, idealized science. The growing primacy of physical theory over observation and experimentation meant that Boltzmann needed a methodology which went beyond...
Elsevier, 1990. — 429 p. The unusual career of the famous Soviet physicist Peter Kapitza was divided between Cambridge and Moscow. In Cambridge he was a protegé of Rutherford and while studying there he opened up a new area of research in magnetism and low temperature physics. However, in 1934, during a summer visit to the Soviet Union, Kapitza was prevented from returning to...
D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974. - 280 p. The first aim of the following selection is to include all of Boltzmann's Populaere Schriften (his Writings addressed to the Public ) that will convey to the modem reader his individual conception of the nature of science in general and theoretical physics in particular. From Populaere Schriften (Writings addressed to the Public) On...
Springer, 2007. - 442 p. Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), the great Danish scientist and philosopher, was one of the founders of modern physics through his experimental discovery in 1820 of the interaction of electricity and magnetism — a key step and model for the further unification of the forces of nature. Followers such as Maxwell and Einstein were, and today searchers...
Oxford University Press, 2005. - 562 p. J. D. Bernal, known as 'Sage', was an extraordinary man and multifaceted character. A scientist of dazzling intellectual ability and a leading figure in the development of X-ray crystallography, he was a polymath, a fervent Marxist, and much admired worldwide. Although he himself never won a Nobel Prize, several of his distinguished...
World Scientific, 2006. — 314 p. At the age of 97, the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe asked his long-term collaborator, Gerry Brown, to explain his physics to the world. A glance at Hans Bethe's published legacy — almost eight decades of original research, hundreds of scientific papers, numerous books, countless reports spanning the key areas of twentieth-century physics — is...
Oxford University Press, 2006. - 329 p. - Foreword by Sir Roger Penrose. This book presents the life and personality, the scientific and philosophical work of Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the great scientists who marked the passage from 19th- to 20th-Century physics. His rich and tragic life, ending by suicide at the age of 62, is described in detail. A substantial part of the book...
World Scientific, 2014. - 264 p. Narrating the well-lived life of the “Chinese Madame Curie” — a recipient of the first Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, as well as the first female president of the American Physical Society — this book provides a comprehensive and honest account of the life of Dr. Wu...
World Scientific, 2013. - 349 p. Robert F. Christy (1916-2012) was a legendary physicist, one of the key players in some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century. He was a student of Oppenheimer, who called him “one of the best in the world.” He was a crucial member of Fermi's team when they first unleashed the unheard-of energies of nuclear power, creating the world's...
Pergamon Press, 1971. - 240 p. This book is a biography of English physicist Edward Victor Appleton (1892-1965). He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1947 for his seminal work proving the existence of the ionosphere during experiments carried out in 1924.
Springer, 1970. — 295 p. The contributors to this volume, mostly physicists, represent different backgrounds and differing points of view on life and science of famous physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. The book presents the review of Mach's work primarily in the light of subsequent developments. Ernst Mach - His Life as a Teacher and Thinker (by Otto Bluth). On Mach's...
Oxford University Press, 2001. — 500 p. This book tells about lives in science, specifically the lives of thirty from the pantheon of physics. Some of the names are familiar (Newton, Einstein, Curie, Heisenberg, Bohr), while others may not be (Clausius, Gibbs, Meitner, Dirac, Chandrasekhar). All were, or are, extraordinary human beings, at least as fascinating as their...
Chelsea House Publishing, New York, 2006. — 193 p. — ISBN: 0816054630 Without the daring, courageous, and innovative thinkers the past, life as we know it would be completely different; Planes, trains, and automobiles would never have been invented; Earth would be considered the center of the universe; and strep throat, polio, and smallpox would still be incurable diseases. Sir...
Taylor & Francis, 1998. - 336 p. This is a tribute to the life and work of Nobel Laureate Nevill Mott (1905-1996), a hugely admired and appreciated man, and one of Britain's greatest ever scientists. The book includes contributions from over 80 of his friends, family and colleagues, full of anecdotes and appreciations for this collossus of modern physics. Preface (by Tony...
Springer, 1987. - 563 p. The book is devoted to life and science of Hendrik Anthony Kramers (1894-1952), a Dutch physicist known for his fundamental works in quantum physics, quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, solid-state physics, etc. With Werner Heisenberg he developed the Kramers–Heisenberg dispersion formula, with Wentzel and Brillouin - the...
Springer, 2013. - 471 p. The subject of the book is a biography of the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Although Sommerfeld is famous as a quantum theorist for the elaboration of the semi-classical atomic theory (Bohr-Sommerfeld model, Sommerfeld's fine-structure constant), his role in the history of modern physics is not confined to atoms and quanta....
Springer, 2019. — 360 p. — (Springer Biographies) This is a comprehensive biography of Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953), the father of modern aerodynamics. His name is associated most famously with the boundary layer concept, but also with several other topics in 20th century fluid mechanics, particularly turbulence (Prandtl's mixing length). Among his disciples are pioneers of...
Springer, 2005. - 221 p. This scientific biography of Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) was written to bring the story of a Norwegian national hero to the attention of the English-speaking world. Birkeland’s heroic stature was established not on a field of military battle, but in the bitter cold of the Artic wilderness as he sought to answer basic questions about how the Sun...
Springer, 2016. - 174 p. This book pays tribute to an extraordinary researcher and personality, physicist Manuel Cardona (1934-2014). He had significant influence in the development of science and inside the scientific community. The book consists of contributions by former collaborators and students of Prof. Manuel Cardona. The short contributions deal with personal encounters...
Oxford University Press, 2002. — 573 p. This book retraces the life of the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli, analyzes his scientific work, and describes the evolution of his thinking. Pauli spent 30 years as a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, which occupy a central place in this biography. It would be incomplete, however, without a rendering of...
Springer, 2017. — 191 p. — (Springer Biographies) This biography sheds new light on the life and work of physicist Ettore Majorana (including unpublished contributions), as well as on his mysterious disappearance in March 1938. Majorana is held by many, including Nobel Laureate, Enrico Fermi, to have been a genius of the rank of Galilei and Newton. In this intriguing story, the...
Springer, 2019. — 165 p. — (Springer Biographies). This book draws upon a wealth of archival material to present the life and achievements of Pietro Blaserna (1836-1918), a “gentleman scientist” whose greatest legacy is considered to be the Institute of Physics on the Via Panisperna in Rome, of which he was the creator and first director. Both in this role and as President of...
Oxford University Press, 2008. — 305 p. This book presents a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize for Science (Physics 1979), who was nevertheless excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. His achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched. Realizing that the whole world had to be his stage, he pioneered the International Centre...
Prometheus Books, 2019. — 97 p. — ISBN: 978-1633885769. A science writer explains the significance of Stephen Hawking's work--in terms all of us can understand. Stephen Hawking was one of the most important astrophysicists of the last fifty years. After the publication of A Brief History of Time, he became an international celebrity. Though the book sold in the millions, few...
Cambridge University Press, 1995. - 323 p. Fritz London was one of the twentieth century's key figures in the development of quantum physics. A quiet and self-effacing man, he was one of the founders of quantum chemistry, and was the first to give a phenomenological explanation of superconductivity. This thoroughly researched biography gives a detailed account of London's life...
World Scientific, 2003. - 394 p. The book contains the biographies of a number of scientists who made great contributions to the field of solid state physics. The Braggs (by A. M. Glazer). William Henry Bragg (1862-1942) (by E. N. da C. Andrade). William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) (by Sir D. Phillips). Peter Debye - A Life for Science (by E. Courtens). Peter Joseph Wilhelm...
Birkhäuser, 1994. - 209 p. - Translated from Russian by Valentina M. Levina. The short life and tragic death of Matvei Petrovich Bronstein (1906-1938) may be seen as a symbol of the man's time and his country. One of the most remarkable features of Soviet history was the impressive advance of its physical sciences against the brutal and violent background of totalitarianism....
Oxford University Press, 2006. - 313 p. If science has the equivalent of a Bloomsbury group, it is the five men born at the turn of the twentieth century in Budapest: Theodore von Karman, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. From Hungary to Germany to the United States, they remained friends and continued to work together and influence each other...
Springer, 2019. — 381 p. — (Springer Biographies). This biography is a personal portrait of one of the best-known Dutch physicists, Nicolaas Bloembergen. Born in 1920 in Dordrecht, Bloembergen studied physics in Utrecht, leaving after World War II for the United States, where he became an American citizen in 1958. At Harvard University, he pioneered nuclear magnetic resonance...
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. - 212 p. By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany’s most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was...
Joseph Henry Press, 2002. - 467 p. Like so much in modern life, immediate name recognition often rests on a cult of personality. We know Einstein, for example, not just for his tremendous contributions to science, but also because he was a character who loved to mug for the camera. And our continuing fascination with Richard Feynman is not exclusively based on his body of work;...
Frank Cass, 2003. — 334 p. This edited volume comprises a series of essays about Patrick Maynard Stewart Blackett, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, known for his work on cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism, winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948. He was a prominent figure in the Royal Navy and British politics as well. Foreword (by Tam...
Oxford University Press, 2004. - 301 p. "Light is a Messenger" is the first biography of William Lawrence Bragg, who was only 25 when he won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics - the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. It describes how Bragg discovered the use of X-rays to determine the arrangement of atoms in crystals and his pivotal role in developing this technique to the...
Springer, 2015. — 263 p. — (Springer Biographies) This biography provides a stimulating and coherent blend of scientific and personal narratives describing the many achievements of the theoretical physicist Herbert Fröhlich (1905-1991). For more than half a century, Fröhlich was an internationally renowned and much respected figure who exerted a decisive influence, often as a...
World Scientific, 2012. — 354 p. Léon Rosenfeld (1904–1974) was a remarkable, many-sided physicist of exceptional erudition. He was at the center of modern physics and was well-known as Niels Bohr's close collaborator and spokesman. Besides he reflected deeply on the history and philosophy of science and its social role from a leftist perspective. As both actor and acute...
Cambridge University Press, 2004. - 389 p. The 250 years from the second half of the seventeenth century saw the birth of modern physics and its growth into one of the most successful of the sciences.The reader will find here the lives of fifty of the most remarkable physicists from that era described in brief biographies. All the characters profiled have made important...
Springer, 2014. - 631 p. Wolfgang Pauli referred to him as 'my discovery,' Robert Oppenheimer described him as 'one of the most gifted theorists' and Niels Bohr found him enormously stimulating. Who was the man in question, Gunnar Källén (1926-1968)? His appearance in the physics sky was like a shooting star. His contributions to the scientific debate caused excitement among...
Oxford University Press, 2008. - 458 p. In 1912 Lawrence Bragg explained the interaction of X-rays with crystals, and he and his father, William thereby pioneered X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography. They then led the latter field internationally for fifty years, when most areas of science were transformed by the knowledge they created: physics, chemistry, geology,...
Vintage Books, 2000. — 464 p. Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York’s East 14th Street, Gell-Mann’s...
MIT Press, 2010. — 307 p. In 2000, Russian scientist Zhores Alferov shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the heterojunction, a semiconductor device the practical applications of which include LEDs, rapid transistors, and the microchip. The Prize was the culmination of a career in Soviet science that spanned the eras of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev — and...
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1970. — 330 p. This book is a biography of Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1933), an Austrian and Dutch theoretical physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transitions and the Ehrenfest theorem. From the Introductory Note : Paul Ehrenfest's name, never known...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2009. - 422 p. Born in 1905, Ernst C. G. Stueckelberg was professor of theoretical physics at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne in the years 1930-1970. He was one of the most eminent Swiss physicists of the 20th century. His breakthroughs, from his causal S-matrix to the renormalization group, have influenced the development of contemporary...
Springer, 1988. - 234 p. The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) was often called the conscience of physics. He was famous for his sharp and critical mind which made him a central figure among the founders of quantum physics. He also was an outstanding philosopher, especially interested in finding a new conception of reality and of causality. A careful study of the...
Facts on File, 2003. - 388 p. Another important survey in the Notable Scientists series, A to Z of Physicists focuses not only on the lives and personalities of those profiled, but also on their research and contributions to the field. A fascinating and important element of this volume is the attention paid to the obstacles that women and minority physicists have overcome to...
Stanford University Press, 2011. — 369 p. James Franck (1882–1964) was one of the twentieth century's most respected scientists, known both for his contributions to physics and for his moral courage. During the 1920s, Franck was a prominent figure in the German physics community. His research into the structure of the atom earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925. After...
Institute of Physics Publishing, 2003. - 298 p. Demonstrating the strength of tradition in Ireland, Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision is a collection of essays on leading figures from the history of physics in Ireland. It includes physicists born outside of Ireland who carried out significant work in Ireland as well as those who had strong Irish roots but carried out...
Oxford University Press, 2000. - 677 p. Julian Schwinger was one of the leading theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. His contributions are as important, and as pervasive, as those of Richard Feynman, with whom (and with Sin-itiro Tomonaga) he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics. Yet, while Feynman is universally recognized as a cultural icon, Schwinger is little...
Springer, 1994. — 289 p. Like Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli was not only a Nobel laureate and one of the creators of modern physics, but also an eminent philosopher of modern science. This is the first book in English to include all his famous articles on physics and epistemology. They were actually translated during Pauli's lifetime by R. Schlapp and are now...
Springer, 2014. — 241 p. This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889-1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925, describes his contributions to both physics and technology, as well as discussing the scientific community which formed around him, usually called the Mandelstam school. Mandelstam’s life story is thereby...
2nd Edition. — Springer, 2019. — 264 p. — ISBN: 978-3-030-17684-6. This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889–1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925 and an Academician (the highest scientific title in the USSR) in 1929, describes his contributions to both physics and technology. It also discusses the scientific...
Springer, 2019. — 203 p. — (Springer Biographies) This book, which will appeal to all with an interest in the history of radiology and physics, casts new light on the life and career of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, showing how his personality was shaped by his youth in the Netherlands and his teachers in Switzerland. Beyond this, it explores the technical developments relevant to...
Springer, 2003. - 309 p. This is not a science book, nor even a book about science, although most of the contributors are scientists. It is a book of personal stories about Walter Kohn, a theoretical physicist and winner of half of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Walter Kohn originated and/or refined a number of very important theoretical approaches and concepts in...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. - 297 p. Broken Genius is the first biography of William Shockley, founding father of Silicon Valley - one of the most significant and reviled scientists of the 20th century. Shockley won a Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor, upon which almost everything that makes the modern world is based. Little has affected history as much as this device,...
Imperial College Press, 2008. - 304 p. Imagining the Elephant is a biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack, a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979 for his pioneering contributions to the development of the computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanner, an honor he shared with Godfrey Hounsfield. A modest genius who was also a dedicated family man, the book is...
Universities Press, 1995. — 99 p. This book is about great Indian physicist Sir C.V. Raman (1888-1970) and his momentous discovery - the famous Scattering Effect. It gives us deep insights into the character of this famous scientist and vividly describes the circumstances surrounding the discovery. The young Raman. Science as a pastime. Raman as Palit Professor. Why is the sea...
Pegasus Books, 2015. — 725 p. A Gripping Account Of A Physicist Whose Speculations Could Prove As Revolutionary As Those Of Albert Einstein... It Can Be Consulted As A Clear And Authoritative Guide Through Three Decades Of Hawking S Central Contributions To Cosmology. - Bernard Dixon In The New Statesman & Society Excellent... From The Opening Pages, Which Relate The Occasion...
A Biographical Memoir / Washington: The National Academy of Sciences, 1994. — 16 p.: ill. — (Biographical Memoirs, 1994, pp. 211–220). Joseph Edward Mayer was a chemist who has formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory. He is one of the founders of the modern theory of nonideal gases, in particular, in 1937 received a general equation of state of real gas....
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