Product Description: On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics...read more

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and Los Angeles Times contributor, the untold story of how science went “big,” built the bombs that helped win World War II, and became dependent on government and industry—and the forgotten genius who started it all, Ernest Lawrence.Since the 1930s, the scale of scientific endeavors has grown exponentially. Machines have become larger, ambitions bolder. The first particle accelerator cost less than one hundred dollars and could be held in its creator’s palm, while its descendant, the Large Hadron Collider, cost ten billion dollars and is seventeen miles in circumference. Scientists have invented nuclear weapons, put a man on the moon, and examined nature at the subatomic scale—all through Big Science, the industrial-scale research paid for by governments and corporations that have driven the great scientific projects of our time. The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, California, nearly nine decades ago, when a resourceful young scientist with a talent for physics and an even greater talent for promotion pondered his new invention and declared, “I’m going to be famous!” Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s cyclotron would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact. It would change our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature. It would help win World War II. Its influence would be felt in academia and international politics. It was the beginning of Big Science. This is the incredible story of how one invention changed the world and of the man principally responsible for it all. Michael Hiltzik tells the riveting full story here for the first time.

Product Description: While the first 30 years of new China's scientific development was a self-reliant era marked by the detonations of the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the launch of the first artificial satellite, the second 30 years after the reform and opening up was signified by the introduction of the Internet to China...read more

Product Description: Incorporating elements from history, science, philosophy and international relations theory, this book takes a fresh look at the life and thought of Robert Oppenheimer. The author argues that not only are Oppenheimer's ideas important, engaging and relevant, but also more coherent than generally assumed...read more

No single figure embodies Cold War science more than the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although other scientists may have been more influential in establishing the institutions and policies of the nuclear age, none has loomed larger in the popular imagination than the "father of the atomic bomb." Americans have been drawn to the story of the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer helped lead and riveted by the McCarthy-era politics that caught him in its crosshairs. Journalists and politicians, writers and artists have told Oppenheimer's story in many different ways since he first gained notoriety in 1945. In Storytelling and Science, David K. Hecht examines why they did so, and what they hoped to achieve through their stories.From the outset, accounts of Oppenheimer's life and work were deployed for multiple ends: to trumpet or denigrate the value of science, to settle old scores or advocate new policies, to register dissent or express anxieties. In these different renditions, Oppenheimer was alternately portrayed as hero and villain, establishment figure and principled outsider, "destroyer of worlds" and humanist critic. Yet beneath the varying details of these stories, Hecht discerns important patterns in the way that audiences interpret, and often misinterpret, news about science. In the end, he argues, we find that science itself has surprisingly little to do with how its truths are assimilated by the public. Instead its meaning is shaped by narrative traditions and myths that frame how we think and write about it.

Product Description: Scientist. Innovator. Rebel. For decades, Freeman Dyson has been regarded as one of the world's most important thinkers. The Atlantic wrote, "In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein – a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distance planets...read more

Product Description: This book is intended for people interested in physics and its philosophy. for those who regard physics as an essential component of modern culture rather than merely a tool for industry or war. Indeed this volume is addressed to those students, teachers and research workers who enjoy learning, teaching or doing physics, and are in the habit of pausing once in a while to ponder over key physical concepts and hypotheses and to wonder whether received theories are as perfect as textbooks would have us believe and, if not, how they might be improved...read more

Product Description: "A worthy addition to the Feynman shelf and a welcome follow-up to the standard-bearer, James Gleick's Genius." ―Kirkus Reviews Perhaps the greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman changed the way we think about quantum mechanics, the most perplexing of all physical theories...read more

The author of Euclid's Window describes his relationship with mentor and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, drawing on meeting transcripts to address such questions as the nature of creativity and the thought processes of scientists. Reprint.

Product Description: A biography of two maverick scientists whose intellectual wanderlust kick-started modern genomics and cosmology. Max Delbruck and George Gamow, the so-called ordinary geniuses of Segre's third book, were not as famous or as decorated as some of their colleagues in midtwentieth-century physics, yet these two friends had a profound influence on how we now see the world, both on its largest scale (the universe) and its smallest (genetic code)...read more

Product Description: "Only the accomplishments of [Robert] Bacher's close friend, Robert Oppenheimer, begin to approach his own," writes Alan Carr, Los Alamos National Laboratory historianin The forgotten Physicist: Robert F. Bacher 1905-2004. By the time Robert Bacher joined the Manhattan Project he had established himself as one of the leading physicists in the United States...read more

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Product Description: Klaus Hoffmann zeichnet ein eindrucksvolles Bild der Persönlichkeit Oppenheimers vor dem Hintergrund der wissenschaftlichen Entdeckungen seiner Zeit. Er zeigt - zum Teil mit Material aus bisher unzugänglichen Quellen - wie der Forscher mit dem Schicksal umging, das atomare Feuer gezündet zu haben...read more