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!
I didn’t so much read this book as inhale it. Rovelli’s writing is always highly readable, and this one is no exception. The book tells the dramatic story of the origin of quantum mechanics, beginning with a holiday spent on the windswept island of Helgoland by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s.
Rovelli introduces the history of the core ideas of quantum mechanics with great clarity and provides an interesting new way of interpreting quantum weirdness that I found fascinating.
Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian
“Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator… This is the place where science comes to life.” ―Neil Gaiman
“One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book” ―John Banville, The Wall Street Journal
A startling new look at quantum theory, from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Anaximander.
By the time I was a high-school junior I knew I wanted to be a physicist. As a graduate student in 1950, as the Cold War was heating up, I joined the relatively small team that designed the first hydrogen bomb and got to work with some of the giants of 20th-century physics. It’s been a pleasure to read about this subject as well as to write about it.
From the birth of the Manhattan Project in 1942 until the first test of an H bomb in 1952, Edward Teller was central to the development of a thermonuclear weapon.
He is called the father of the H bomb with good reason. Yet, he is controversial. He made more enemies than friends. His own account of that period is fascinating. I worked with Teller and was a friend.
The fascinating recollections of one of the most brilliant and controversial scientists of the 20th century. . The story of Edward Teller is the story of the twentieth century. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller witnessed the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism, two world wars, the McCarthy era, and the changing face of big science. A brilliant and controversial figure whose work on nuclear weapons was key to the American war effort, Teller has long believed in freedom through strong defense, a philosophy reflected in his stance on arms control and nuclear policy. These extraordinary recollections at last reveal the…
History of science books are rarely as interesting as this one. In a vivid style that carries themes across half page long sentences, it tells stories of the development of Prussian blue and cyanide; the life and work of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Karl Schwarzschild and the physics revolution of early 20th century; and the work of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. The last story of a lemon tree is a disappointing let down. But the first four are fantastic; they inform and entertain, and they should be read befitting their style, despite their hard science core, in a state of dreamlike reverie.
When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
At breakneck pace and with wondrous detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the…
It was in 1982, while a Fulbright scholar in the USSR researching my doctoral dissertation, that I realized my responsibility as a historian extended far beyond writing history books. I lived among Russians and saw up close how the Kremlin-controlled what citizens knew about their own past. The future was already determined—the end of class struggle. The past was merely a made-up prologue. As a consequence of that year, I focus on the creation, preservation, and accessibility of cultural knowledge. History clues us into where we come from. Like a DNA test, it reveals how our single life is intricately braided with people we will never meet.
I wrote my books to reveal how a government’s lies about the present and past corrupts not only public life, but reaches deep into the psyches of individuals.
The correspondence between the physicist Heisenberg, working in secret on the atomic bomb (notoriously unsuccessfully), and his wife safe in Bavaria provides an intimate glimpse of how deeply the Nazi regime penetrated family life and challenged the natural love of one’s homeland.
Heisenberg and his wife were very much in love, devoted to each other and their children. They had a true and equal partnership. Readers can enjoy the sweet irony of knowing how the war turned out, something the participants could not know.
Instead, they were occupied with worries about food, money, the children’s health, sadly aware that things could never go back to how they were.
Personal letters reveal the quandary of a prominent German physicist during the Nazi years and the strength he shared with his loving wife
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg lived far from his wife, Elisabeth, during most of the Second World War. An eminent scientist, Werner headed Germany's national atomic research project in Berlin, while Elisabeth and their children lived more safely in Bavaria. This selection of more than 300 letters exchanged between husband and wife reveals the precarious nature of Werner's position in the Third Reich, Elisabeth's increasingly difficult everyday life as the war progressed, and the devoted relationship that…
I am a professor of philosophy at New York University, but my interests have always fallen at the intersection of physics and philosophy. Unable to commit to just one side or the other, I got a joint degree in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. My fascination with Bell’s Theorem began when I read an article in Scientific American in 1979, and I have been trying to get to the bottom of things ever since. My most recent large project is a Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.
Beller did a lot of the historical work that Becker relies on, delving deeply into the personal interaction between Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and the other founders of quantum theory. The presentation is more scholarly than Becker’s but is a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand the fine details of how quantum theory emerged from that set of distinctive personalities.
This work seeks to show that science is rooted not just in conversation but in disagreement, doubt and uncertainty. Mara Beller argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue and controversy within the scientific community that fuels creativity. Beller draws her argument from her reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation. One of several competing approaches, this version succeeded largely due to the rhetorical skills of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Using archival research, Beller shows how Bohr and others marketed their views, misrepresenting and dismissing their opponents as "unreasonable" and…
As a professor, I see students fascinated by science, but petrified to take a science class. This is in part because we have dehumanized science, removed the story, edited out the human, deleted the parts that allow people to connect with it. Science does not get delivered by gods, but is created by people: smart, quirky, sometimes immoral people. As a writer, my hope is to be able to reinsert life into readers’ understanding of our greatest advances. As a reader myself, I am deeply appreciative when other authors do it too.
The early period of the development of quantum mechanics were heady days, full of fascinating characters and factional infighting. As Europe was about to tear itself apart again, the physics community had also fractured. Jones explains the scientific fault lines and the personal relations (some of them quite racy!) that were in play as the modern theory of the atom unfolded.
Theoretical physics is in trouble. At least that's the impression you'd get from reading a spate of recent books on the continued failure to resolve the 80-year-old problem of unifying the classical and quantum worlds. The seeds of this problem were sewn eighty years ago when a dramatic revolution in physics reached a climax at the 1927 Solvay conference in Brussels. It's the story of a rush to formalize quantum physics, the work of just a handful of men fired by ambition, philosophical conflicts and personal agendas. Sheilla Jones paints an intimate portrait of the key figures who wrestled with…
