Basic Books, 2015. - 378 p. It was at the height of the Cold War, in the summer of 1950, when Bruno Pontecorvo mysteriously vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Who was he, and what caused him to disappear? Was he simply a physicist, or also a spy and communist radical? A protégé of Enrico Fermi, Pontecorvo was one of the most promising nuclear physicists in the world. He spent...
Faber & Faber, 2015. — 336 p. By the age of 11, Taylor Wilson had mastered the science of rocket propulsion. At 13, his grandmother's cancer diagnosis drove him to investigate medical uses for radioactive isotopes. And at 14, Wilson became the youngest person in history to achieve nuclear fusion. How could someone so young achieve so much, and what can Wilson's story teach...
CERN Courier. – 2010, 50N6, p. 24-27. Dmitri Diakonov looks at some of the work behind two equations that play a vital role in calculating QCD scattering processes at today's high-energy particle colliders. Quantum electrodynamics (QED) provided the theoretical laboratory to check the new ideas of particle "reggeization". In several pioneering papers Gribov, Lipatov and...
Proceedings of the Memorial Workshop Devoted to the 80th Birthday of V N Gribov – London: World Scientific, 2011 – 597 p. – ISBN: 9814350184, 9789814350181. Vladimir Naumovich Gribov was one of the most outstanding theoretical physicists, a key figure in the development of modern elementary particle physics. His insights into the physics of quantum anomalies and the origin of...
Chelsea House, 2003. - 110 p. A biography of Maria Goeppert Mayer, a physicist who contributed to the development of the atomic bomb and who, in 1963, was cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on the nuclear shell model theory.
Harvard University Press, 2004. - 469 p. One Nobel Prize-winning physicist called Edward Teller, "A great man of vast imagination.[one of the] most thoughtful statesmen of science." Another called him, "A danger to all that is important. It would have been a better world without [him]." That both opinions about Teller were commonly held and equally true is one of the enduring...
Oxford University Press, 2005. - 406 p. How did Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist and the acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, become a human rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize? In his later years, Sakharov noted in his diary that he was "simply a man with an unusual fate." To understand this deceptively straightforward...
Chelsea House Pub., 2010. - 124 p. Chien-shiung Wu recounts the life and work of the Chinese-American nuclear physicist known for her work during World War II on the Manhattan Project, for which she found ways to produce radioactive uranium for the atomic bomb and improve radioactive detectors. The book includes information on Wu's contributions to experimental physics that...
CRC Press, 2007. - 195 p. Yoshio Nishina not only made a great contribution to the emergence of a research network that produced two Nobel prize winners, but he also raised the overall level of physics in Japan. Focusing on his roles as researcher, teacher, and statesman of science, Yoshio Nishina: Father of Modern Physics in Japan analyzes Nishina's position in and his...
World Scientific, 2013. - 148 p. In 1980, the Cold War was in full bloom. The Soviet father of the hydrogen bomb and Nobel Peace Laureate turned dissident physicist, Andrei Sakharov, had been exiled to Gorki by the Soviet authorities. Called senile and under heavy Soviet censorship, Sakharov had a hard time communicating his latest scientific results to readers outside of...
Chapter from the book "Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics was Shaping Destinies". Shifman M. (Ed.). 2013. – Ch. 10: Time and Destinies. – 11 p. Vladimir Gribov (1930-1997) was one of the leading figures in post-World War II Soviet theoretical physics. He and his colleagues worked at the cutting edge of quantum field theory, plasma physics, nuclear and...
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. — 307 p. This book presents the biographies of women who participated in early studies of radioactivity, and alters the conventional story of radioactivity by including their work. The authors recover the forgotten women pioneers of nuclear science and present them as agents whose work had a major impact on the scientific...
Birkhauser, 2007. - 432 p. - Foreword by John Archibald Wheeler. In this captivating biography, Patricia Rife interprets both the life and times of Lise Meitner (1878-1968), the female physicist at the heart of the discovery of nuclear fission. She was a colleague and friend of many of the giants of 20th century physics: M. Planck, her Berlin mentor, A. Einstein, M. von Laue,...
With an introduction by Joshua Rubenstein; Documents translated by Ella Shmulevich, Efrem Yankelevich, and Alla Zeide Yale University Press, 2005. 448 p., ISBN: 9780300106817 Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), a brilliant physicist and the principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, later became a human rights activist and — as a result — a source of profound irritation to the...
Prometheus Books, 2017. — 324 p. Richard Garwin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Called a “true genius” by Enrico Fermi, Richard Garwin has influenced modern life in far-reaching ways, yet he is hardly known outside the physics community. This is the first biography of one of America’s great minds – a top physicist, a brilliant...
Springer, 2020. — 511 p. — (Springer Biographies) This biography chronicles the life and achievements of the Norwegian engineer and physicist Rolf Widerøe (1902-1996). Readers who meet him in the pages of this book will wonder why he isn't better known. The first of Widerøe's many pioneering contributions in the field of accelerator physics was the betatron, the second, the...
The University of Chicago Press, 2012. — 292 p. This study promotes a better understanding of the Pontecorvo affair through an analysis of the scientist’s research interests and the circumstances that led to his departure in 1950. In particular, it looks at Pontecorvo’s life and career in combination with developments in nuclear science and technology, changes in the setting up...
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