Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

This richly-illustrated 2004 book presents a year-by-year chronicle of the Nobel prize in Physics since 1901.

Mauro Dardo (Author)

9780521540087, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 October 2004

546 pages, 223 b/w illus. 3 tables
24.6 x 18.9 x 2.8 cm, 0.97 kg

Dardo has been remarkably successful in assembling a year-by-year survey of 20th century physics and its geniuses within 500 pages, well illustrated by many small historic, often informal, pictures and some helpful diagrams. … dipping into a chapter is a delight that yields an absorbing read and readily leads one via cross-referencing to descriptions of both earlier and later achievements and Laureates.' Contemporary Physics

In this richly-illustrated 2004 book the author combines history with real science. Using an original approach he presents the major achievements of twentieth-century physics - for example, relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, the invention of the transistor and the laser, superconductivity, binary pulsars, and the Bose-Einstein condensate - each as they emerged as the product of the genius of those physicists whose labours, since 1901, have been crowned with a Nobel Prize. Here, in the form of a year-by-year chronicle, biographies and revealing personal anecdotes help bring to life the main events of the past hundred years. The work of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century - great names, like the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Rutherford, and Schrödinger - is presented, often in the words and imagery of the prize-winners themselves.

1. Introduction
2. Founding fathers
3. Highlights of classical physics
Part I. The Triumphs of Modern Physics (1901–50): 4. New foundations
5. The quantum atom
6. The golden years
7. The thirties
8. The nuclear age
Part II. New Frontiers (1951–2003): 9. Wave of inventions
10. New vistas on the cosmos
11. The small, the large - the complex
12. Big physics - small physics
13. New trends.

Subject Areas: Physics [PH], Popular science [PDZ], History of science [PDX]