physics einstein physical philosophy

books:

3 reviews
Abraham Pais

Oxford University Press, USA, 2007

The best book on Oppie at IAS
There have been several good biographies of Oppenheimer in the past few years. As biographies the others are probably better. This book though has two real advantages over the others: First, Abraham Pais was a physicist himself. He worked with Oppenheimer and knew all or most of the significant physicists involved with atomic energy during and after the war. His insights on the physics being ...

Niels Bohr's Times,: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity

9 reviews
Abraham Pais

Oxford University Press, USA, 1994

INSPIRING: It's a small world after all
Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr, NIELS BOHR'S TIMES, IN PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITY, isn't really about rock 'n' roll, and you can't find anything about Aimee Mann in the index, but anyone who has a sense of the multiplicity rampant in modernity ought to want to sit these people down for a good listen to the `It's Not Safe' song at the end of the `I'm with Stupid' (1995) CD by Aimee Mann. ...

Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World

1 review
Abraham Pais

Oxford University Press, USA, 1988

A magisterial account of the 20th Century revolution in particle physics
It is 8 November 1895 in the late afternoon and you are a physicist working in France, feeling somewhat dysphoric because everything that is knowable in Physics has been discovered, and the world and its clockwork mechanism explained and codified in a series of brilliant differential equations. All that remains is to dot a few i's and then the great course of knowledge begun by Galileo and ...

Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein

9 reviews
Abraham Pais

Oxford University Press, USA, 2005

A beautiful and challenging book !
This is a beautifully written book. I have been intrigued by the personality of Albert Einstein since my childhood (when I saw a postage stamp with his portrait and the famous equation "E=mc^2"), and I always wanted to know what exactly has made him so famous. During my school years I loved to read books about physics, and always enjoyed lessons of physics in school. By that time I thought that I ...

Paul Dirac: The Man and his Work

3 reviews
Abraham Pais, Maurice Jacob, ...

Cambridge University Press, 2005

A Tribute to a Brilliant Man
A man Stephen Hawking calls 'probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton,' has got to be a pretty bright man. Paul Dirac wrote the definitive equasion that joined the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Like Einstein before him, his equasion is very simple to express, very complex in its overall impact. It explains things like how television sets or computers work. ...