BY WILLIAM H. CROPPER
An excellent book for anyone interested in a concise story of the development of physics
5 stars out of 5 stars
This book attempted, in about 460 pages, to tell the story of physics from the lives and work of a selected group of great physicists, from Galileo to Stephen Hawking. Thirty of them were selected. They were grouped into eight subfields of physics: mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, particle physics, and astronomy/astrophysics/ cosmology. Under each subfield, there ranged from one (relativity, statistical mechanics) to eight (thermodynamics) physicists chosen as the individuals who made the key contributions.
The story in each subfield started with a concise and informative historical synopsis, laying out the background, and proceeding to its development. For each physicist, there was a brief biography and a description of his/her contributions. In addition, their personalities were profiled, with interesting and often amusing traits. Let me illustrate with several examples.
- Sadi Carnot, of Carnot engine fame, was the son of Lazare Carnot, who was high up in the French Government and a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. Young Carnot used to accompany his father and mother to Napoleon’s residence. Napoleon was then a first Consul, not yet declared himself emperor. On one such visit, Madame Bonaparte, Sadi’s mother, and other ladies were amusing themselves in a rowboat on a pond when Napoleon appeared and splashed water on the rowers by throwing stones near the boat. Sadi, about four years old at the time, indignantly confronted Bonaparte, called him “beast of a First Consul,” and demanded that he stopped, Napoleon could do nothing but stared at the tiny attacker in astonishment.
- Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) carried a green book with him all the time. He always stopped to do calculations in the green book whenever an idea occurred to him, even when he was entertaining guests.
- One of Richard Feynman’s haunts in Pasadena was Giannoni’s topless bar. His remarkably understanding wife Gweneth called it Feynman’s “club”. Gweneth also had no objections when Feynman took up drawing from nude female models in his home studio (one of them formerly the subject of a centerfold feature).
- Richard Feynman’s mother Lucille was known to have a great sense of humor. After Feynman became famous, he was celebrated as the “smartest man in the world”. When a friend told Lucille about this, she responded: “If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.”
Among things not on the amusing side, I learned that the way we manipulate vectors, i.e., Vector Analysis, was due to Willard Gibbs. Before Gibbs, the handling of vectors relied on the rather cumbersome method of “quaternions,” formulated by Rowan Hamilton and used by James Maxwell. Gibbs earned the first American doctoral degree in engineering in 1863 from Yale. He taught for many years at Yale with no salary. (How anyone could do that is beyond me.) Yale paid Gibbs a salary in 1880 only when Johns Hopkins tried to hire him away. Even so, the salary offered by Yale was only two thirds of that offered by Johns Hopkins. Anyway, he stayed at Yale.
One of the occupational hazards of scientists is too much detachment from human problems. This was never a danger in Neils Bohr’s work. For Bohr, scientific problems were human problems. The best example of this was his effort in trying to prevent a nuclear arms race between the East and West after World War II. With the help of those close to Churchill and Roosevelt, he was granted the opportunities to speak in person to both leaders about the importance of avoiding a nuclear arms race through an open nuclear policy. Unfortunately, his speaking style did not impress the two great orators, and his vision of an open nuclear policy came to nothing.
Of the 30 great physicists selected, only two were female. They were Lise Meitner and Marie Curie, both selected for their contributions to nuclear physics. Marie Curie had the distinction of being the first scientist, man or woman, to receive two Nobel Prizes. She was the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. Like her husband Pierre Currie, she did not care for medals, awards, or publicity. To persuade her to visit the United States, an American Journalist named Mario Meloney raised a huge sum of money to buy one gram of radium as a gift, which was presented to her in a White House reception by President Harding on May 20, 1921.
I have two comments of the book which are less than complementary. I am somewhat puzzled that James Watt was not mentioned in the discussion of steam engines. Equally perplexing was that Georges Lemaître’s 1927 paper suggesting that the Universe was expanding was not mentioned in the chapter on Edwin Hubble. Despite these omissions, “Great Physicists” is an excellent book for anyone interested in a concise story of the development of physics through the lives of the central characters of the story.
The book contains a chronology of the main events which is both a useful and a convenient reference. In the chapter on Max Planck, the author thought the quote “He explored the explorable and quietly venerated the inexplorable”, might have been a suitable epitaph for Max Planck. Indeed, it may equally serve as the epitaph for all the great physicists profiled in the book.
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