Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safecracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustible combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal skepticism. Over a period of years, Feynman's conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton were first taped and then set down as they appear here, little changed from their spoken form, giving a wise, funny, passionate and totally honest self-portrait of one of the greatest men of our age.

Largely autobiographical account of the author's life as one who fell in love first with physics and then with teaching physics to students.

Abraham Pais's 'Subtle is the Lord...' is the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. Timothy Ferris, in The New York Times Book Review, called it "the biography of Einstein he himself would have liked best," adding that "it is a work against which future scientific biographies will be measured." As a respected physicist himself, Pais was the first biographer to give Einstein's thinking its full due, and as a close friend and associate of Einstein, he could provide an intimate, first-hand account of the life of this great scientist. The result was a national bestseller. Indeed, it was one of The New York Times's Best Books of the Year, and the winner of the 1983 American Book Award for Science. Now, Pais turns his attention to the great physicist's life outside of science, with an informal, almost kalaidoscopic portrait of Einstein--his personal life and his public persona ("my mythical namesake who has made my life so burdensome"), his scientific contributions, and his thoughts on religion, philosophy, and politics, on Israel and Zionism, on the rise of Nazism and McCarthyism, and on much more. Pais offers a candid look at Einstein's troubled personal life--his two failed marriages, his first child Lieserl, who was born out of wedlock (and of whom all trace has vanished), his estranged son Hans Albert, also a scientist, who felt his father had abandoned the family, and his son Eduard, who gradually descended into madness. Of course, any book on Einstein must touch upon science, and Pais includes several illuminating chapters, one of which offers general readers an accessible explanation of relativity, and another traces the long road to Einstein's Nobel Prize (after being nominated almost every year from 1909 to 1920, he finally won in 1921--not for relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect). On the lighter side, Pais includes samples from Einstein's "curiosity file," in which he kept crank letters, marriage proposals, hate mail (one began "You are the prince of idiocy, the count of imbecility, the duke of cretinism, the baron of morons"), and the like. But the heart of the book is the final section, where Pais traces Einstein's life as seen through the media. Here we not only meet Einstein the living legend--receiving the keys to New York City from flamboyant Mayor Jimmy Walker, attending the Hollywood premier of City Lights with Charlie Chaplin--but also witness his extensive involvement in the issues of his day. Much of his commentary is amazingly prescient. In 1933, he said of Nazism: "I cannot understand the passive response of the whole civilized world to this modern barbarism. Does the world not see that Hitler is aiming for war?"

How did a near-extinct species, eking out a meager existence with stone axes, become the dominant power on earth, able to harness a knowledge of nature ranging from tiny atoms to the vast structures of the universe? Leonard Mlodinow takes us on an enthralling tour of the history of human progress, from our time on the African savannah through the invention of written language, all the way to modern quantum physics. Along the way, he explores the colorful personalities of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, and traces the cultural conditions—and the elements of chance—that influenced scientific discovery. Deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark humor and insight, The Upright Thinkers is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity and an important book for any reader with an interest in the scientific issues of our day.

Hailed by the "Journal of the History of Astronomy" as "charming and witty," this chronicle by a renowned physicist traces the development of scientific thought from the works of the "founding fathers" Galileo, Huygens, and Newton to the more recent discoveries of Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. 1984 edition.

Sir Isaac Newton is among the giants of the scientific era. It was Newton who conceived the imperial vision of mathematical physics and Newton again who created the first and perhaps the greatest of scientific theories. Physicists searching for the elusive final theory that will conclusively explain matter in all of its manifestations are his heirs. Yet for all that, Newton has remained inaccessible to most modern readers, and even to many scientists, indisputably great but indisputably remote. In this witty, engaging, and often moving examination of Newton's life, David Berlinski recovers the man behind the mathematical breakthroughs. The story carries the reader from Newton's unremarkable childhood to his awkward undergraduate days at Cambridge and then to the astonishing year in which, working alone, he laid the foundation for his system of the world. Thereafter, Berlinski describes the creation of Newton's masterpiece, the "Principia Mathematica," the monumental feuds that poisoned his soul and that wearied his supporters, and Newton's final re-creation of himself as the master of England's financial system. This is less an exhaustive biography than an appreciation of Newton's greatest accomplishment. When he brought together years of work and towering logic into his "system of the world," Newton projected just one human mind to the outermost stars and planets. At once, he forever redefined the meaning of "nature," and of man's place in the cosmos. This seminal creative act has proved more powerful than that of any politician or king and more long-lasting than any dynasty. "Newton's Gift" is an edifying celebration of a transcendent man.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist ’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World ’s Book of the Year A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

"Here is the story of how two people most influenced Feynman's early years-his father, who taught him to think, and his first wife Arlene who taught him to love, even as she lay dying in an Albuquerque hospital while Feynman worked nearby, on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. And here are lighter moments, some told through letters, as Feynman reports from Geneva, Trinidad, Greece, and Japan on the effects this curious character has had on the locals. The second half of the book...is Feynman's behind-the-scenes account of the investigation that followed the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in January 1986"--Jacket.

Offers a profile of Academy Award winning sound and film editor Walter Murch and his amateur work in astrophysics as an outsider trying to rehabilitate the discredited eighteenth-century Titius-Bode theory.

In the spring of 1919, two British solar eclipse expeditions confirmed the correctness of general relativity theory and propelled Albert Einstein to instant celebrity. Before this major turning point, the majority of Einstein's writings published in this volume dealt with the clarification of general relativistic problems, such as the status of the metric field, the character of gravitational waves, the problem of energy-momentum conservation, and questions of cosmology, such as the nature and size of the universe and the distribution of matter within it. After his rise to international fame, Einstein's publications changed markedly. He faced an increasing demand for popular articles and lectures on relativity, its development and meaning. He also felt compelled to respond to a host of commentators, ranging from skeptical physicists to philosophers trying to reconcile his revolutionary theory with their views. For the first time, he also responded in print to outspoken anti-relativists, some of them fueled by cultural conservatism and, frequently, anti-Semitism. Einstein used his newly won fame to lend prestige to political causes, especially to the reconciliation among European nations and to Zionism. In the early years of Weimar Germany, Einstein spoke out vigorously for the young republic, emphasizing the rights of the individual. He agonized over the misery of the Central Europeans in the grip of starvation and economic collapse, praised the support of individuals and groups such as the Quakers, and championed the cause of Eastern European Jews. His rejection of assimilation, combined with a fierce defense of the right of Jews to higher education, led Einstein to campaign for the establishment of a university in Palestine, the land which he conceived of as a cultural center for all Jews.

"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais tells fascinating stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac, Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about nonscientists like Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals. His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book that is partly a memoir, partly a travel commentary, and partly a history of science. Pais's charming recollections of his years as a university student become somber with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He was presented with an unusual deadline for his graduate work: a German decree that July 14, 1941, would be the final date on which Dutch Jews could be granted a doctoral degree. Pais received the degree, only to be forced into hiding from the Nazis in 1943, practically next door to Anne Frank. After the war, he went to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr. 1946 began his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked first as a Fellow and then as a Professor until his move to Rockefeller University in 1963. Combining his understanding of disparate social and political worlds, Pais comments just as insightfully on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the McCarthy era as he does on his own and his European colleagues' struggles during World War II. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A fascinating tribute to the forefathers of two of today’s most exciting scientific fields Thanks to Max Delbruck and George Gamow, today we have mapped the human genome and understand the ramifications of the Big Bang. In his characteristically inviting and elegant style, Gino Segre brings to life the story of these two great scientists and their long friendship and offers an accessible inside look the people behind the scenes of science—the collaboration and competition, the quirks and failures, the role of intuition and luck, and the sense of wonder and curiosity that keeps these extraordinary minds going.

Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age Elsasser, Walter M.

Analogies play a fundamental role in science. To understand how and why, at a given moment, a certain analogy was used, one has to know the specific, historical circumstances under which the new idea was developed. This historical background is never presented in scientific articles and quite rarely in books. For the general reader, the undergraduate or graduate student who learns the subject for the first time, but also for the practitioner who looks for inspiration or who wants to understand what his colleague working in another field does, these historical circumstances can be fascinating and useful. This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution.

A portrait of the twentieth-century scientific community and a memoir of the scientist who was at the forefront of particle physics.