The Strange Case of Mrs. Hudson's Cat: Or Sherlock Holmes Solves the Einstein Mysteries, by Colin Bruce (New York: Vintage, 1998) is the sort of book other authors berate themselves for not having thought of first. Bruce has written a series of Holmes and Watson stories, each of which depends for its resolution on a basic principle from physics. Watson bumbles, Baker Street is fogged in, Professor Challenger is perfidious—and learning is effortless.
Special Relativity Introductions
The Time and Space of Uncle Albert, by Russell Stannard (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), imagines a series of teasing conversations between a kindly Uncle Albert and his trendy niece Gedanken. It's advertised as aimed for teens or even preteens, but it's an excellent start for adults. Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, by George Gamow (various editions), has a similarly sweet touch. Instead of analyzing the whys of the equation, at least at first, Gamow simply places an imaginary befuddled bank clerk within the settings that relativity and other branches of physics describe. (His work has been updated by Russell Stannard in The New World of Mr. Tompkins [New York: Cambridge University, 1999]. Einstein's Legacy: The Unity of Space and Time, by Julian Schwinger (Basingstoke, England: Freeman, 1986) moves up a level, giving a clear and eloquently written account of relativity and the equation; The Wald and Geroch texts mentioned on page 318 apply as well.
Newton
Of the many Newton biographies, I'd start with A. Rupert Hall's Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The Norton critical anthology Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: Norton, 1995) gives copious extracts from Newton, as well as samplings of the twentieth-century secondary literature, from Keynes and Koyre to Westfall and Schaffer. It's the best guide to going further.
Into the Atom (Chapters 8 and 9)
C. P. Snow's fourteen-page essay on Rutherford in his Variety of Men (London: Macmillan, 1968) sounds as if you're hearing an insider whispering to you what really happened at the Cavendish lab in the glory days. There's Rutherford's bluff grandstanding—when told he was always on the crest of the wave, he boomed, "Well, after all, I made the wave, didn't I?!" But there are also the hesitancies underneath, as with Rutherford's quiet, suddenly blurted insistence that certain overseas scholarship funds be continued: "If it had not been for them, I shouldn't have been."
After Snow's essay, try Rutherford by A. S. Eve (London: Macmillan, 1939) for further recounting of the early days. Despite the less-than-ingenious title, Rutherford by Mark Oliphant (New York: Elsevier, 1972) is an original and intense work, getting across Rutherford's fury—and then embarrassed half-apologies—as he saw the world-dominating research unit he'd created slowly start to break, not least through character flaws of his own. Oliphant was one of the last of Rutherford's promising young students, and the individual who kick-started Briggs to get the U.S. atomic bomb project going; after a distinguished post-war career that included decades of working against nuclear weapons, he died shortly before his ninety-ninth birthday, just weeks before this book was going to press.
The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick, by Andrew Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is suitably neutral to match the discoverer of the neutron. It goes into the early years thoroughly enough though to show how the quiet Chadwick became one of the only individuals to stand up to both Oppenheimer and Groves—thus giving him a key role in the success of the Manhattan Project. The way that the bitter rivalries at the end between Chadwick and his mentor Rutherford were carried out through the mercilessly taut coolness between their wives is best, however, in Oliphant's account.
Atoms in the Family, by Laura Fermi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), is an account of Fermi by his wife, who has something of the sweetly teasing tone of Einstein's sister. For more on the scientific background and personality of this quietly driven man, there's Enrico Fermi, Physicist, by Emilio Segre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). The evocative essay "Fermi's group and the recapture of Italy's place in physics," in The Scientific Imagination, by Gerald Holton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) goes into the Rome research group in detail, including the importance of Fermi's having found an all-powerful bureaucratic protector.
How did Rutherford and Fermi manage to sustain such powerful research centers? Edward Shils's Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) is good on the standard sociological backing, while J. H. Brown's "Spatial variation in abundance," Ecology 76 (1995), pp- 2028-43, is an interesting demonstration of the way low competitive pressure can be excellent for fresh speciation. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research by Terence Kealey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996) takes a quirkily refreshing approach, showing, for example, how pharmaceutical firms and other research groups regularly profit from hiring top scientists who think they're going to do original work, but in fact are useful simply because they can intelligently sieve the available literature.
Lise Meitner: A Life In Physics, by Ruth Lewin Sime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) is clear on the background, and also takes a justly strong feminist line; see also the first-rate essay on Meitner by Sallie Watkins in A Devotion to Their Science, ed. Marlene F. and Geoffrey W. Rayner-Canham (Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997). They're the ideal backing for Meitner's own brief account "Looking Back," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20 (Nov. 1964), pp. 2-7. Otto Frisch's autobiography What Little I Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) is a delightful view from this gentler man; Aging and Old Age by Richard Posner (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1995) is a fresh take on the role of sunk costs in long research careers.
Building the Bomb (Chapters 10-13)
In 1943, armed guards from the United States Army would have taken a strikingly personal interest in any outsider who tried to copy Robert Serber's lectures for arriving scientists at Los Alamos—for those lectures surveyed everything that was then known about building atomic weapons. Copies are now somewhat more conveniently available in Serber's The Los Alamos Primer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Along with all the lectures, now declassified, the book contains Serber's own excellent annotations and reminiscences. It's the ideal way to capture the working mood at Los Alamos.
On Oppenheimer, the best source is Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, ed. Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner (Palo Alto, Calif: Stanford University Press pbk 1995; orig. Harvard University Press, 1980). The letters are almost shatteringly direct: there are the brief moments of intellectual joy; then the self-torments, the insecurities, and the layers upon layers of posturing. How he and Lawrence overcame their own warinesses to become best friends—and then exhausted, dismayed enemies—is the drama in Nuel Phar Davis's masterpiece Lawrence and Oppenheimer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). Richard Feynman's best-selling reminiscences "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" ed. Edward Hutchings (New York: Norton, 1985) are vivid on the personal level; James Gleick's Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (New York: Pantheon, 1992), gives a far richer story of what Feynman and others experienced on the mesa.
The best overall account of the U.S. and German projects is Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), a deserved winner of the National Book Award. Eavesdropping is a guilty pleasure, and in Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, ed. and annotated by Jeremy Bernstein (Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1996) we get to eavesdrop on Hahn, Heisenberg, and all the rest of them as the interned German scientists squabble their way through six long months in genteel captivity. Bernstein's background on the science and the personalities is extremely clear. Alsos: The Failure in German Science, by Samuel Goudsmit (London: Sigma Books, 1947; reissued Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1995), although inaccurate in parts, is a poignant firsthand account by the head of the U.S. mission entering Europe before t
he war was over to collect information—and snatch scientists— from the German side.
Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971) is Heisenberg's own account of his life and main intellectual branching points. David Cassidy's Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (Basingstoke, England: Freeman, 1992) enriches the story. Out of fairness I should mention Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, by Thomas Powers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), which takes a view very different to my own; his thesis is seriously questioned in the lengthy review by Richard Peierls, available in his Atomic Histories (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997), pp. 108-16, as well as in Jeremy Bernstein, ed. Hitler's Uranium Club, the review in Nature, 563 (May 27,1993), pp. 311-12, and especially the reviews in the American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 1715-17, and Paul Lawrence Rose's Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
An excellent account of the Norway events is Knut Haukelid's own Skis Against the Atom (London: William Kimber, 1954, reissued), while the brief sections in Leo Marks's extremely readable Between Cyanide and Silk: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) on the solidarity of the Norwegians as they trained in London adds to an understanding of their success. On the UK effort, Operation Freshman: The Rjukan Heavy Water Raid 1942, by Richard Wiggan (London: William Kimber, 1986) makes good use of transcripts from the war crime trials later held in Norway, and also captures the befuddlement of the tough London kids sent out to this lethal, wintry terrain.
The American decision to use the bomb is surveyed from a conventional military/strategic viewpoint in Americans at War, by Stephen E. Ambrose (New York: Berkeley Books, 1998), pp. 125-38; from an administrative viewpoint in Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945, by Margaret Gowing (London: Macmillan, 1964). Best of all, though, is J. Samuel Walker's Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which emphasizes how much the ill-prepared Truman was pushed and led by his advisors, with their own bureaucratic, geopolitical, and domestic concerns; also how many of the key American military leaders then would have been startled by the later consensus that the bombing was inevitable.
Whether or not the decision was justified, the accounts in Chapter 19 of Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb are a necessary reminder of what the decisions meant on the ground those two summer mornings in August; the almost aphasic resistance of many postwar researchers to discuss any aspect of the morality of their weapons work is a central topic in The Genocidal Mentality: The Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, by Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen (London: Macmillan 1991).
The Universe (Chapters 14-16)
Payne
The richest source here is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, ed. Katherine Haramundanis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1996). See also George Greenstein's reflective essay "The Ladies of Observatory Hill," in his Portraits of Discovery (New York: Wiley, 1998). An interesting comparison from a later generation is Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters by Vera Rubin (Woodbury, N.Y: American Institute of Physics, 1997), while George Gamow's dated though highly readable The Birth and Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and Subatomic Energy (London: Macmillan, 1941) gives a useful impression of solar physics in Payne's time.
Hoyle and Earth
Fred Hoyle is the best writer of any high-level scientist I'm aware of: his autobiography, Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a pleasure to read. One learns why his generation of youngsters suffered the wettest feet in Yorkshire (previous generations had clogs, which let water drain through, the next generation had boots, which kept water out, but his had cheap boots, which let water in and kept it there). One also learns about Dirac's lecturing style, Eddington's thinking style, the distortions produced by Cambridge's overdifficult exams, the achievements produced by Cambridge's intensely fair scholarships, as well as pointers on nucleosynthesis, RAF versus Royal Navy research styles, academic politics, and the surprising durability of cardboard cars.
For the wider context in which Hoyle worked, again Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: William Morrow, 1988) is ideal.
Chandrasekhar
Kameshwar C. Wali's Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) is an excellent biography, and the sixty pages of transcripts of Wali's conversations with Chandra in the Epilogue are especially recommended. When Chandra describes Fermi ("The fact, of course, was that Fermi was instantly able to bring to bear, on any physical problem . . . his profound and deep feeling for physical laws. . . . [The] motions of interstellar clouds with magnetic lines of force threading through them reminded him of the vibrations of a crystal lattice; and the gravitational instability of a spiral arm of a galaxy suggested to him the instability of a plasma and led him to consider its stabilization by [a] . . . magnetic field."), he's also describing himself: giving us a glimpse of what it might be like to view the world through such a powerful, interlinking mind. I'd also recommend Chandra's own book of essays, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
For further topics in astrophysics there are an abundance of fine texts. The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity, by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (New York: Free Press, 1999), is especially good, covering the story from the earliest moments to a very, very distant future. Stephen Hawking's collection Black Holes and Baby Universes (New York: Bantam, 1993) is entertaining and wryly thoughtful; while for the reader who relishes popular science books on the universe but finds they're beginning to blur, I'd strongly suggest stepping back and working through a crisp introductory text such as The Dynamic Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, by Theodore P. Snow (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, several editions).
General Relativity (Epilogue)
The best introduction I'm aware of is also one of the most concise. It's Robert M. Wald's Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes. To go along with that there's Robert Geroch's equally excellent General Relativity From A to B. Both Wald and Geroch take a clear geometrical approach, and have numerous picture diagrams carrying the story along through their texts, so the nonscientist will find them as easy as reading a book on architectural design—only here the design is that of our universe.
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, by Kip Thorne (New York: Norton, 1994) is much longer, and sometimes loses the thread in its gushing biographical backgrounds. But much of it is vivid, and Thorne, as much as Wald and Geroch, has been a leader in the field of general relativity for decades. For a thoughtful account of the 1919 eclipse expeditions—and Eddington's true motivations— don't miss Chapter 6 of Chandrasekhar's Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.
Acknowledgments
I couldn't have written this book on my own. A lot of it developed out of the Intellectual Tool-Kit courses I taught at Oxford, which Roger Owen and Ralf Dahrendorf were central to getting started. Avi Shlaim helped nurture that series over the years, and Paul Klemperer made apt comments after one of the creativity lectures, which helped lay the idea for an expansion of the physics aspects of that course.
Once a first draft was done, several friends were kind enough to read the manuscript in its entirety: Betty Sue Flowers, Jonathan Rowson, Matt Hoffman, Tara Lemmey, Eric Grunwald, Peter Kramer, and Caroline Underwood. They gave excellent suggestions, a number of which I even adopted. George Gibson and Jackie Johnson at Walker & Company were even more valiant: repeatedly offering wise comments that improved the book no end. Readers who looked through particular chapters for accuracy, or answered specific questions, included Steven Shapin, Dan van der Vat, Shaun Jones, Bob Wald, Tom Settle, Malcolm Parkes, Ian Kogan, Da
vid Knight, Winston Scott, and Frank James. None of them, of course, are responsible for any errors that remain.
Two individuals gave especially important aid. In a series of long, flowing phone talks Doug Borden helped me see how the final visions of the "energy" and "mass" chapters could be best developed. Gabrielle Walker, the most eloquent of friends, talked me through all aspects of the book, opening up a world of honest writing in conversations that sparked across months of fine dinners. In one particularly memorable late-night stroll through St. James's Park, she explained how the quietly widening chorale of the St. Matthew's Passion showed the way to escape from strict chronology after the equation's story reached 1945. The book would have collapsed after chapter thirteen without that.
For a long time I was perplexed about what level of explanation would be best in the main chapters. Peter Kramer, especially, was persuasive in his observation that I needed to give the results of the equations, without slighting the explanation of why the equation holds true. To do this, I put an indispensable core of explanation in the main text, a little more in the notes at the end, then even more—and especially anything that involves mathematics—on the Web site, davidbodanis.com. I like the idea that a book is no longer a single defined object, limited by the technology of paper and glue and stitching. To keep the Web site from being only for technical types, I also included there some reminiscences of boyhood in Chicago (which with only a slight twist lead to an explanation of how space and time slosh into each other). There are also insights from William Blake, samples of Einstein's voice, links to the courses I offer on the equation, a look at why simple art forms such as equations are so often true, and other odds and ends.
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