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Summary: Physics Can Be Fun!
Review: Given, I find the sciences interesting, but I never thought I would find myself endlessly turning pages of a physics book. The lives of these physicists was amazing and sometimes even more interesting than their discoveries. If you are at all interested in a "behind-the-scenes" look at post-Einsteinian physics, I would whole-heartedly recommend this book. I guarantee you'll be pleasently surprised. (Now if only there was a biology version of this book...)
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Summary: A great 100 year long trip comes full circle
Review: One of the consolations of being a graduate student at a big ten university is having marvellous libraries at your disposal. I picked this one up two years ago in one of my favorite sections: general physics and biography of physicists. This book gives a clear account of how we got from the physics of the turn of the centry, when some wag suggested all that was left to do was to measure constants to the next decimal place, to today where... uh... gee, it looks like we are stuck in the same bind again! But what a century it has been. It was a treat to see how the problems of the "ultraviolet catastrophe" (quantization of light), X-rays and other radiation (atomic structure), and the non-existance of the aether (relativity) spawned whole new areas of inquiry. The interesting thing is that we have indeed come full circle... probing nature to provide support for the "Theories of Everything" will either require ingenuity and precision in measurement that defies belief, or accelerators far beyond our ability (let alone will!) to build. Meanwhile, are there any small, nagging inconsistancies lying about that will provide rich fodder for the next generation? But that is a tale for a book yet to be written. Until then, if you want the low down on 20C physics, this is an excellent place to start. The authors give especially warm and entrancing accounts of their interviews with some of the movers and shakers in the field that give a nice helping of human color to what could have been much too dry a book.
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Summary: The best popular science book yet written
Review: This book has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the telling of the story of 20th century fundamental physics is a task that should not be entrusted to physicists. No, it appears a journalist and a philosopher are not only able to bring the story to life in a way that almost all physics text books fail to do, but at the same time to never lose sight of the important scientific issues.I thought that I understood these issues well, having been a researcher in the area myself until 1987, but I have to report that they filled embarrassingly large gaps in my knowledge, particularly in relation to experiments, including in subjects that I used to teach to undergraduates. I would recommend this book to anyone, but most of all to those who call themselves practitioners in the subject, to remind them of how, if at all, what they do fits in to the bigger picture, and also to remind them, to quote Murray Gell Mann (who was probably quoting someone else at the time), that "the best instrument that a theoretician has is his waste paper basket". As the mathematical tangents that theoreticians have gone off on in the last twenty years get ever more bizarre and disconnected from reality, I fully expect this to be full to overflowing soon.
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Summary: Excellent history of particle physics
Review: This book is an excellent choice if you are looking for an easy-to-read history of the development of particle physics in the twentieth century. The book almost reads like a novel. The authors lead us on a tour of the most critical breakthroughs from the discovery of the electron to that of the top quark. Each episode describes not only the physics but also provides interesting insights into the physicists who made the contributions. It is a great diary of man's attempts to discover the smallest components of matter.
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