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This volume intertwines science, history, philosophy, theology, and politics in fresh and fascinating ways to solve the multifaceted riddle of what religion means - and what it means to science.
Ioan James celebrates the extraordinary contribution made by Jewish people in mathematics and physics, from the mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, to distinguished nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Niels Bohr. He tells the life-stories of thirty-five men and women, born in the nineteenth century, who were at the forefront of research in the closely related fields of mathematics and physics, often in the face of various kinds of anti-Semitism. Some were caught up in the trauma of the Nazi accession to power in Germany and the Second World War. Wolfgang Pauli, described as 'greater than Einstein' by his contemporary Max Born, became a German national following the...
C P Snow’s sketches of famous physicists and explanation of how atomic weapons were developed gives an overview of science often lacking. This study provides us with hope for the future as well as anecdotes from history.
The Leo Baeck Institute, to whose late president this book is dedicated, has three branches, located in Jerusalem, London, and New York. Its chief aim is the collection of documents describing the history of Jews in German-speaking countries, the manifold aspects of the association of the two ethnic groups, over a period of about 150 years; that is, from the time of the Enlightenment until the rise to power of the Nazi regime. Twenty-three Year Books (1956-1978) so far and many additional vol umes about special fields have been published by the institute. They offer an impressive documentation of the role Jews played in Germany, some of their great achievements, the difficulties they encount...
From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos—and a call for a more liberatory practice of science. Winner of the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology Winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science Winner of the 2022 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award A Finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A Smithsonian Magazine Best Science Book of 2021 A Symmetry Magazine Top 10 Physics Book of 2021 An Entropy Magazine Best Nonfiction Book of 2020-2021 A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A Booklist Top 10 Sci-Tech Book of the Year In ...
One of the most remarkable things about the Jewish people over the last several thousand years has been their creativity in many fields, especially in science. They have also been impressive in their participation in questioning values, dismantling dogmas, and the disruption of hidden forces. We must underscore the fact that the contribution of Jews to science was out of proportion to the percentage of the population that they represent. In illustrating the lives and work of these 33 Nobel Prize winners in physics, the author analyzes the factors which favored these prodigious breakthroughs by Jewish scholars. “In the first part of the book, the author shows us with great erudition that the quest and great respect for knowledge have always marked the Jewish communities. The second part shows us an impressive fresco of contemporary physics where, in one Nobel Prize biography after another with lively and easy-to-read texts, we follow the development of a beautiful epic through the entire twentieth century.” — from the Foreword by Maurice Jacob/CERN
This book recalls, for nonscientific readers, the history of quantum mechanics, the main points of its interpretation, and Einstein's objections to it, together with the responses engendered by his arguments. Most popular discussions on the strange aspects of quantum mechanics ignore the fundamental fact that Einstein was correct in his insistence that the theory does not directly describe reality. While that fact does not remove the theory's counterintuitive features, it casts them in a different light.Context is provided by following the history of two central aspects of physics: the elucidation of the basic structure of the world made up of particles, and the explanation, as well as the p...
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they immediately expelled Jewish academics, unwittingly changing the power balance of world science. When war came, these scientific refugees raced to engineer the atomic bomb, to prevent Nazi Germany getting there first. This book tells the story of how the Bomb and the Holocaust became locked in a grisly race.
Hargittai tells the story of five remarkable Hungarians: Wigner won a Nobel Prize in theoretical physics; Szilard was the first to see that a chain reaction based on neutrons was possible, initiated the Manhattan Project, but left physics to try to restrict nuclear arms; von Neumann could solve difficult problems in his head and developed the modern computer for more complex problems; von Kármán became the first director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, providing the scientific basis for the U.S. Air Force; and Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose name is now synonymous with the controversial "Star Wars" initiative of the 1980s.