Physics Science

This is a very interesting book, but it is very challenging to read if you do not know more than high school physics. There is a lot of discussion about theory, but no explanation of the theories. It needed a little “dumbing down” of the physics to make it more comprehensible. It also presumes a lot of knowledge about both Einstein & Oppenheimer. For example the author states as fact that Oppenheimer lost his security clearance & the career path results, but doesn’t detail how this security clearance loss came about.

When not discussing physics, the book is interesting in its discussion of the men and their interest in philosophy, and in comparing & contrasting the men in many ways. There is also a lot of interesting information on Los Alamos and WWII & post WWII politics about the bombs.

Rating: 2 / 5

XXXXX

“The person endowed with [great] talent thinks more rapidly and accurately than [other people]; on the other hand, the genius perceives a world different from [other people], though only by looking more deeply into the world that lies before them.” (Philosopher Schopenhauer)

The above quote is found in this extremely well-researched and well-written book (subtitled “The Meaning of Genius”) authored by Silvan Schweber who is Professor of Physics and Professor in the History of Ideas, Emeritus, at Brandeis University.

(Brandeis University is a private research university founded in 1948 and located in Massachusetts. It is named after the first Jewish Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis.)

Schweber tells us in his acknowledgements that this book “is the result of lectures I gave during the 2005 Einstein celebrations and of my continued involvement with the life of Oppenheimer.”

Schweber explains his book:

“It explores aspects of the lives and personalities of [Albert] Einstein [1879 to 1955] and [J. Robert] Oppenheimer [1904 to 1967] that have received less attention [in other popular books]: their views of individual and collective creativity, their link to Buddhist thought, their metaphysics, and in particular, how they coped with their lives after having climbed to summits that are unreachable to almost everyone else–this last, an aspect of their lives that is put into sharper relief by a comparative study…[Another] possible [subtitle] for [this] book might have been “The Scientific and Political Scene of Their Times.”

{Einstein is perhaps best known for the following: (1) his general theory of relativity (1916) (2) his special theory of relativity (1905) (3) photoelectric effect (for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921) (4) Brownian motion (5) mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2) (6) his field equations (7) Bose-Einstein statistics (8) attempts at a classical unified theory (of gravitation and electromagnetism).

Oppenheimer is perhaps best known for (1) atomic bomb development (He became scientific director of the Manhattan Project: the World War 2 effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) (2) Born-Oppenheimer approximation (3) Oppenheimer-Phillips process (4) work on electron-positron theory (5) relativistic quantum mechanics (6) quantum field theory (7) quantum tunneling

(8) black holes.}

This book is not a full-scale biography of these two men (nor is it meant to be). What it does is look at their lives, the meaning of greatness, and their interactions in order to better understand them, both individually and in the larger community and context of their time.

Thus this book examines these two men individually with two chapters devoted first to Einstein and then two devoted to Oppenheimer. The final two chapters examine Einstein and Oppenheimer together.

What I especially found interesting were the excerpts of actual correspondence reproduced in the main narrative not only of Einstein and Oppenheimer but also of significant others of that time. The only appendix has a copy of the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto” of July, 1955 (drafted by philosopher Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein), outlining the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and calling for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.

Finally, there are nine black and white photographs in this book. Some of these are very interesting. I would have liked to have seen more photos.

In conclusion, this book answers key questions and gives some insights into the character of two prominent science icons of the twentieth century!!

(first published 2008; preface; introduction; 6 chapters; concluding remarks; main narrative 315 pages; appendix; notes; bibliography; acknowledgements; index)

< >

XXXXX

Rating: 5 / 5