A Revealing Profile of the Father of the Atomic Bomb Highly praised by New York Review of Books, The Spectator, Los Angeles Times, Booklist, & More J. Robert Oppenheimer was a puzzle to everyone. The nuclear physicist most responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb, he was a genius both scientifically and otherwise. His standards were impossibly high. He read widely in many languages, wrote poetry, and did superb science. Yet in Jeremy Bernstein's intensely interesting biographical memoir, Oppenheimer emerges as a man unsure of his identity and captive to an element of self-destructiveness in his makeup. Oppenheimer is the long-awaited book that many people feel Mr. Bernstein was almost born to write. As a former colleague of Oppenheimer's, he has composed a book that is both personal and historical, bringing the reader close to the life and workings of an extraordinary and controversial man. Oppenheimer once told the author that during the now-famous hearing in which he lost his security clearance—one of the most spectacular attacks of the McCarthy era—he felt it was happening to someone else. His lawyer at the hearing, after being with Oppenheimer day in and day out for several months, said he did not know him in any real sense at all. Yet everyone in the scientific community and in government agreed that without Oppenheimer's totally remarkable leadership at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb would not have happened, and the Second World War would have ended very differently. Filled with revealing insights and details that set the historical record straight, Oppenheimer is that rare quantity: a vastly entertaining study of one of the most important and enigmatic scientists of the atomic age. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs.

An introduction to computers giving a brief history of the machines in addition to the author's personal experiences while learning to work with them

Essays discuss how the early work of Einstein, a then-unknown patent office clerk, could be told from the work of a crank, the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, the foremost woman mathematician of the nineteenth century, and other scientific subjects

"This book is an essay collection, along with short stories, which attempts to explain some scientific ideas. Jeremy Bernstein was a long time staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine as well as a theoretical physicist. He has received several awards for his writing"--

This book of essays in four parts, was written over a decade and full of surprises for the breadth and variety of its subject matter. The first part is about the foundations of the quantum theory which reflects the author's many conversations with the late John Bell who persuaded him that there is still no satisfactory interpretation of the theory. The second part deals with nuclear weapons. One of the essays concerns the creation of the modern gas centrifuge which was done by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The proliferation of these centrifuges was one of the issues in the spread of nuclear weapons. The third section deals with financial engineering with a profile of Louis Bachelier, the French mathematician who created it at the beginning of the 20th century. The final section deals with the Higgs boson and how it is used for generating mass. It includes a detailed article of how this mechanism works.

When plutonium was first manufactured at Berkeley in the spring of 1941, there was so little of it that it was not visible to the naked eye. It took a year to accumulate enough so that one could actually see it. Now there is so much that we don’t know what to do to get rid of it. We have created a monster. The history of plutonium is as strange as the element itself. When scientists began looking for it, they did so simply in the spirit of inquiry, not certain whether there were still spots to fill on the periodic table. But the discovery of fission made it clear that this still-hypothetical element would be more than just a scientific curiosityâ€"it could be a powerful nuclear weapon. As it turned out, it is good for almost nothing else. Plutonium’s nuclear potential put it at the heart of the World War II arms raceâ€"the Russians found out about it through espionage, the Germans through independent research, and everybody wanted some. Now, nearly everyone has someâ€"the United States alone has about 47 metric tonsâ€"but it has almost no uses besides warmongering. How did the product of scientific curiosity become such a dangerous burden? In his new history of this complex and dangerous element, noted physicist Jeremy Bernstein describes the steps that were taken to transform plutonium from a laboratory novelty into the nuclear weapon that destroyed Nagasaki. This is the first book to weave together the many strands of plutonium’s story, explaining not only the science but the people involved.

The engrossing account of how a boy who grew up more interested in jazz than science became obsessed with physics and relativity during his first year at Harvard.

Book is used and has been withdrawn from service from a Library. Book has a Library Binding and the usual Library Stamps, Stickers, Card Holder, Library Markings. May or May Not have a Dust Jacket.