Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

by Mauro Dardo

• ISBN13: 9780521540087
• ISBN10: 0521540089
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this richly-illustrated 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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Founding fathers

3. Highlights of classical physics

4. The Triumphs of Modern Physics (1901-1950): 4. New foundations

5. The quantum atom

6. The golden years

7. The thirties

8. The nuclear age

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.