Here are 100 books that Lise Meitner fans have personally recommended if you like
Lise Meitner.
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I am a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Ten years ago, I switched my research focus from solid-state physics to the history of that subject. This was fertile ground because professional historians of science had almost completely ignored solid-state physics. I began my new career by writing two journal articles about the physicist Walter Kohn and his discovery of what became the most accurate method known to calculate the properties of solids. This experience led me to broaden my perspective and ultimately produce a biography of the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. My next book will be a historical-sociological study of self-identity and disciplinary boundaries within the community of physicists.
Don’t let the length (over 900 pages) of this biography put you off. Instead, immerse yourself in the slow and powerful current of author Richard Westfall’s superbly written and richly detailed portrait of the skills, achievements, and obsessions of the singular genius that was Isaac Newton. Westfall explains in a masterful way Newton’s mathematics, his physics, his heretical theology, his fixation with alchemy, his activities running the Royal Mint, and his disputes with other scientists. These features, and Westfall’s evocative description of the intellectual and social milieu of Newton’s 17th-century world, make Never at Resta compelling read.
This richly detailed 1981 biography captures both the personal life and the scientific career of Isaac Newton, presenting a fully rounded picture of Newton the man, the scientist, the philosopher, the theologian, and the public figure. Professor Westfall treats all aspects of Newton's career, but his account centres on a full description of Newton's achievements in science. Thus the core of the work describes the development of the calculus, the experimentation that altered the direction of the science of optics, and especially the investigations in celestial dynamics that led to the law of universal gravitation.
I am a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Ten years ago, I switched my research focus from solid-state physics to the history of that subject. This was fertile ground because professional historians of science had almost completely ignored solid-state physics. I began my new career by writing two journal articles about the physicist Walter Kohn and his discovery of what became the most accurate method known to calculate the properties of solids. This experience led me to broaden my perspective and ultimately produce a biography of the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. My next book will be a historical-sociological study of self-identity and disciplinary boundaries within the community of physicists.
For my money, Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental scientist of the nineteenth century. His notebooks detailing his achievements in electrochemistry and electromagnetism should be read by every budding experimentalist as models to emulate. The late Sir John Thomas, a distinguished solid-state chemist, wrote this short biography (only 234 pages) of Faraday during his tenure as the Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Thomas’ scientific expertise, his insider status, and his graceful writing style led him to produce a real gem. Enjoy yourself as Thomas recounts Faraday’s ascent at the Royal Institution from laboratory assistant to full professor, his scientific work, his private life, and his unmatched skill as a popularizer of science.
A self-educated man who knew no mathematics, Michael Faraday rose from errand boy to become one of Britain's greatest scientists. Faraday made the discoveries upon which most of twentieth-century technology is based and readers of this book will enjoy finding out in how many ways we are indebted to him. The story of his life speaks to us across the years and is a fascinating read, especially when the tale is told with the understanding and gusto that Professor Thomas-one of the UK's leading scientists-brings to the telling.
Faraday took great trouble to make the latest discoveries of science, his…
I am a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Ten years ago, I switched my research focus from solid-state physics to the history of that subject. This was fertile ground because professional historians of science had almost completely ignored solid-state physics. I began my new career by writing two journal articles about the physicist Walter Kohn and his discovery of what became the most accurate method known to calculate the properties of solids. This experience led me to broaden my perspective and ultimately produce a biography of the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. My next book will be a historical-sociological study of self-identity and disciplinary boundaries within the community of physicists.
This biography brings fully to life the multi-faceted Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Although best known as the co-inventor of quantum mechanics, he later wrote a book calledWhat is Life which inspired many physicists to apply their talents to biology. Moore gives a full account of Schrödinger’s upbringing, his education, his science, and his extensive philosophical writings. You can judge for yourself if Moore is persuasive when he argues that the erotic intensity of several of Schrödinger’s extramarital affairs helped fuel and found expression in some of his specific scientific achievements.
Erwin Schroedinger was a brilliant and charming Austrian, a great scientist, and a man with a passionate interest in people and ideas. In this, the first comprehensive biography of Schroedinger, Walter Moore draws upon recollections of Schroedinger's friends, family and colleagues, and on contemporary records, letters and diaries. Schroedinger's life is portrayed against the backdrop of Europe at a time of change and unrest. His best-known scientific work was the discovery of wave mechanics, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1933. However, Erwin was also an enthusiastic explorer of the ideas of Hindu mysticism, and in the…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I am a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Ten years ago, I switched my research focus from solid-state physics to the history of that subject. This was fertile ground because professional historians of science had almost completely ignored solid-state physics. I began my new career by writing two journal articles about the physicist Walter Kohn and his discovery of what became the most accurate method known to calculate the properties of solids. This experience led me to broaden my perspective and ultimately produce a biography of the theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. My next book will be a historical-sociological study of self-identity and disciplinary boundaries within the community of physicists.
The brilliant and enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer was the man who led the effort to create the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during World War II. I value this biography because author Ray Monk does full justice to his subject’s science—the science that put Oppenheimer’s Berkeley research group at the center of American theoretical physics in the 1930s. Best of all, Monk’s elegant writing makes even familiar episodes come alive. I felt I was watching a car crash in slow motion as I read how Oppenheimer’s complex personality and political naivete led him to underestimate his political enemies and wind up stripped of his security clearance and his influence as a government advisor.
An unforgettable story of discovery and unimaginable destruction and a major biography of one of America’s most brilliant—and most divisive—scientists, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center vividly illuminates the man who would go down in history as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer’s talent and drive secured him a place in the pantheon of great physicists and carried him to the laboratories where the secrets of the universe revealed themselves. But they also led him to contribute to the development of the deadliest weapon on earth, a discovery he soon came to fear. His attempts to resist the…
I have always enjoyed talking with others about books, including throughout my education at St. John’s College (the Great Books school) and my graduate work. Recently I was able to reunite online with college classmates; during Zoom sessions, we discuss fictions that are meaningful to us. Additionally, as a literature and women’s studies professor at a technological university, I am always looking for interesting texts to discuss with students and to analyze in my research. The books I selected have been book club selections, course readings for my classes in gender studies and in comparative literature, and/or have been the focus of my writing about women and feminism.
This collection of comics by different women cartoonists explains the challenges and successes of six women scientists in the 20th century.
Although I am familiar with the scientists’ biographies and their celebrated discoveries, I liked seeing how well the different cartoonists make use of the affordances of the comic book format to convey women’s situations, emotions, and steps toward empowerment as well as the technical aspects of their scientific work. It would make an attractive book club choice for students or adults.
This original graphic novel features famous women scientists including Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Barbara McClintock, Birute Galdikas, and Hedy Lamarr. The stories offer a human context often missing when we learn about the discoveries attached to these scientists' names. Readers, drawn in by the compelling anecdotes, will discover intriguing characters, while end notes and references will lead them to further information on the scientists they've read about.
I am the co-founder and current owner of The Manhattan Rare Book Company. I’ve been in the rare book business for 25 years, specializing in the history of science with particular emphasis on material relating to Albert Einstein. Like many people, I’ve long been drawn to Einstein, attracted by his wisdom, curiosity, personality, approachability, and general decency.
Using Einstein's most famous equation as his organizational theme, Bodanis offers a fresh and exciting approach to Einstein's life and work. Energy, mass, and the speed of light become characters of their own as Bodanis traces our evolving understanding of the nature of the universe. The book is all about context—delightfully so—giving Bodanis an excuse to introduce a kaleidoscope of colorful personalities who either influenced Einstein, or were influenced by him, all connected by their relationship to this most powerful of all equations.
Already climbing the bestseller lists-and garnering rave reviews this "little masterpiece" sheds brilliant light on the equation that changed the world.
Bodanis begins by devoting chapters to each of the equation's letters and symbols, introducing the science and scientists forming the backdrop to Einstein's discovery from Ole Roemer's revelation that the speed of light could be measured to Michael Faraday's pioneering work on energy fields. Having demystified the equation, Bodanis explains its science and brings it to life historically, making clear the astonishing array of discoveries and consequences it made possible. It would prove to be a beacon throughout the…
I’ve been fascinated by science since I was a small child. I used to try to drag my parents up to London’s Natural History Museum to gawk at dinosaurs every other Sunday and remember the delight of seeing Saturn and its rings through a telescope from our back garden. I started reading popular science books as a teenager and they were a large part of what inspired me to ultimately become a physicist. I hope the books on this list will bring a bit of awe and wonder into your life!
This is a thrilling book that tells the story of the quest to split the atom in the 1920s and 30s at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.
I love the way Cathcart brings historic characters like Ernest Rutherford to life on the page, and really gets across the excitement of a period where physicists were making incredibly rapid progress in understanding the deepest workings of nature.
"Cathcart tells this exhilarating story with both verve and precision" --The Sunday Telegraph
Re-creating the frustrations, excitements, and obsessions of 1932, the "miracle year" of British physics, Brian Cathcart reveals in rich detail the astonishing story behind the splitting of the atom. The most celebrated scientific experiment of its time, it would lead to one of mankind's most devastating inventions--the atomic bomb.
All matter is made mostly of empty space. Each of the billions of atoms that comprise it is hollow, its true mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus that, if the atom were a cathedral, would be no bigger…
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
There are so many histories of fin de siècle Vienna that this book is a welcome, long-awaited postlude. It explains how the city’s creativity did not die with the fall of the Habsburgs but became the source of everything we think of today as “modern”, from shopping, to cooking, to economics, to housing, education and the interaction of state and society.
Berlin may have been livelier in the 1920s, but the new ideas that would take root across the world and shape modern society were still coming out of Vienna.
How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?
Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens-every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.
The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated,…
When I find a big story that has not come out, which has massive relevance for history and for the entire world, I go all out to bring it to light, as I have done with this book. Most of the books I have written have been devoted to telling big, unknown stories that concern the world. (Examples: alien intelligence, the origins of ancient civilisations, the Chinese contribution to the history of inventions, the existence of optical technology in antiquity, who were the people who tried and executed King Charles I and why did they do it.) I simply had to expose this information to the public.
This is a gigantic book of 665 pages, and a reading task not for the faint-hearted. It has no index, but then, preparing one might have taken months and easily have added another 100 pages to the book.
It is a reference book which can aid anyone seriously interested in the SS security services, the SD. Much of it is based on the basic SS files seized after the War, and it summarises and reproduces those with meticulous and overwhelming thoroughness. But it must be pointed out that the higher-level secret files of the SS and SD have never been found.
The Heinrich Pfeifer book supplies a great deal of information which was unavailable to Tyas. The personnel files of the department heads of the SD have not been found, and the most detailed account of that level of the operations of the SD is to be found in Pfeifer’s…
During the Nazi regime in Germany, all police forces were centralised under the command of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The political police (Gestapo), the criminal police (Kripo), and the security service (SD) were all brought together under the RSHA umbrella in 1939, commanded by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich. Using RSHA in Berlin as the centre, the web of Heydrich's control extended into every corner of Nazi-occupied Europe. British and American intelligence agencies tried to get to grips with RSHA departments at the end of the war, knowing who was who and what they did, relying on what captured RSHA personnel told them…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
When I find a big story that has not come out, which has massive relevance for history and for the entire world, I go all out to bring it to light, as I have done with this book. Most of the books I have written have been devoted to telling big, unknown stories that concern the world. (Examples: alien intelligence, the origins of ancient civilisations, the Chinese contribution to the history of inventions, the existence of optical technology in antiquity, who were the people who tried and executed King Charles I and why did they do it.) I simply had to expose this information to the public.
This book was originally published by Doubleday, New York, in 1944. This book also contains material obtained from Heinrich Pfeifer, not only from Pfeifer’s own experience but from Pfeifer’s secret network of sympathisers and informants deep within the Nazi Establishment.
It is alarming in the extreme, detailing as it does how the Nazis of the SS and SD had since 1943 started planning to metastasize their doctrines all round the world, and found a Nazi International organisation, with the eventual hope of creating a Fourth Reich which was not dependent upon the territory of Germany, but was spread across the world invisibly, so that no armies could ever conquer it.
They planned the ratlines and escape routes to all the friendly countries such as Argentina and Chile. Their ratline HQ was in Madrid, with the full cooperation of the Franco Government. One of the two chief organisers was SS Lieutenant…
'Its existence is known only by the effects of its action.' Author Curt Riess on what happens when an organisation goes underground. Written in 1944, thus contemporary to the events of the Second World War and Nazi Germany, The Nazis Go Underground describes how the Nazis planned and organised their descent into the underground as early as 1943. At this stage of the war, the situation for the Third Reich looked grim. With Bormann and Himmler as its architects, the Nazi party would go underground and prepare for World War III from the shattered ruins of Berlin. German generals were…
