No comments about Lord Nuffield: An Illustrated Life of William Richard Morris, Viscount Nuffield, 1877-1963 (Shire Library).

3 comments about Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age.

1. Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, by J.A. Wheeler is a fascinating book documenting the extraordinary life of an aspiring woman scientist whose life was filled with adversity. Surviving both World Wars and gender discrimination, Meitner was a pioneer at the forefront of her discipline involving the study of radio-elements and nuclear fission. At the University of Vienna and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Meitner was inspired to study experimental physics with a focus on atomic structure by her two most memorable professors Boltzmann and Planck. Meitner's major discovery was her work with Hahn and the splitting of the atom (nuclear fission). This monumental discovery led to the invention of the atomic bomb, which drastically changed warfare. Besides her accomplishments Meitner was a truly inspiring woman for her strength and personal conviction. Meitner barely escaped from Nazis Germany only to be isolated in Sweden from the international scientific community. She helplessly watched her lifetime of dedication and achievement be overlooked by the Nobel Prize Committee countless times, only to have Hahn receive all the credit. In the face of the immanent destruction of her career and life by the Nazis she experienced the pain of being abandoned by close colleagues. Rising above her obstacles she dedicated her life to helping victims of the Holocaust and refusing to work on chemical warfare or nuclear bomb research, but instead working towards awareness of the moral responsibilities scientists needed to have in this new nuclear age.



2. While there has been a recent renewed interest in the life of Lise Meitner, and a number of biographies have appeared, this I believe is the first one to focus on physics, as opposed to personalities. I may add that the authors do weave together an entangled web of scientists, their thoughts (through correspondence), their ambitions, and their (in many cases) flawed judgments. And the narrative is captivating!
   
   Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878, and she started her career in the turbulent times of the First World War, at a time when Germany was a clear leader in physics research, in the Golden Era of physics. Yet, Lise Meitner was the first woman German scientist; first PhD in physics. When she started her studies, German universities were almost entirely closed to women; and especially so in the sciences.
   The authors bring to life the turbulent events in modern history which shaped Lise Meitner's career. A central theme in the book is the physics community's reaction to the first use by the USA of a fission bomb over Japan in 1945.
   
   In Berlin, building on a decade of research by Meintner and Otto Hahn, in 1938, the three Lise Meitner, Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. The Nobel Prize went to Hahn alone, and Lise Meitner has until recently been largely forgotten. In this interesting book, the authors examine why. Readers may find that the reasons are different from what we might have guessed.
   
   Many of the German scientists in the 1930ties were Jewish, or partly Jewish, and they were dismissed by Hitler in 1933, or in the years up to the war. The year before the outbreak of war in 1939 was the last chance to escape, and the entire physics community dispersed as German scientists had to flee, --- some chose to escape. A small number went to neutral Sweden, and others who had left earlier ended up in the USA, and became leaders in the Manhattan project, the secret Los Alamos team of scientists, led by Oppenheimer, the team which built the first atomic bomb. There were some German scientists, Otto Hahn among them who didn't have to flee. They included Lise Meitner's research collaborators, Hahn, and Strassmann, plus Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg. At the end of the war, their relationships resumed, and an examination (in the book) of private letters reveals some fascinating new insight. Palle Jorgensen, October 2005.



3. Patricia Rife has made a scientific subject meaningful in the comprehensible biography: "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age." This is a well researched and an acknowledgement of a woman's contribution to peace and medical technology. Lise Meitner devoted her life to research and was denied many Nobel Peace Prize awards because of her sex. This book is for every young woman, public library, high school library or anyone interested in an outstanding book of historic subjects. Special accolades to the author, Patricia Rife, for her professional treatment of this manuscript.

No comments about The Writing Life of James D. Watson.

No comments about Measuring Mother Earth: How Joe the Kid Became Tyrrell of the North.

1 comments about Making Waves (Masters of Modern Physics).

1. This book shows the wide variety of subjects that Charles H. Townes explored and did substantive and original contributions. Then he is uniquely qualified for criticize excesses in unifying attempts in the frontiers of Physics and the overlaps of this discipline with other fields (Townes'Gathering of the Realms') when he say: "Scientists have now become a good deal more cautious and modest about extending scientific ideas into realms where they have not yet been throughly tested. We know today that the most sophisticated scientific theories, including quantum mechanics, are still incomplete". Reading these words one is like to ask: How much dose of caution and modesty a scientist must employ (e.g. extending quantum mechanical concepts to scientific anomalies 'no througly tested' or to theological thinking) for him/her starting a useful speculation on likely future explanatory theories of hypothetical consilient gatherings of realms?. In fact Townes himself is the first to break this advice of caution when he extends the uncertainty and complementarity principles to spiritual and ethical dimensions. All the contemporary attempts of scientific synthesis begin breaking this rule: Penrose extending quantum gravity theory into neurobiological realms still not 'throughly tested', Deutch stretching the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to computation, evolution and epistemology -realms where experiments still are in the long process of exploring the shocking implications of his insights-, Wolf dazzling extension of quantum vacuum physics to deep psychology and religion, fiels where of course testing is far of being 'throughly' examined, Jahn and Dunne 'metaphorical' generalization of QM to anomalous consciousness phenomena where both the theory and the claimed experimental results to be explained by the theory are by the time being far of 'unbiased' evidential scrutiny, and finally (we are distant of a complete review of synthesis-looking extrapolations) we have Wilson extension of non-quantum biological thinking to anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy and the arts where the Townes'caution criteria is openly broken. May be the reason for wanting to extrapolate our 'still incomplete' scientific theories into still untested realms must to be looked in the last author (Wilson), in our yearning of "interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines", our "need to search for the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning". Do not blame the generalists if their longing for consiliense outpace their caution and modesty. In these terms Townes book is a ideal complement to Wilson's "Consiliense".

1 comments about Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution.

1. This a brief, entertaining biography of a great man whose work has saved millions of lives, including, perhaps, my own. It's the type of book one would hope every high school student would be expected to read.

1 comments about The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, Volume 5: 1855-1860.

1. Michael Faraday ranks today as one of the greatest chemists and physicists of all time. In fact, it was more or less in the era that he lived that physics and chemistry separated as sciences. He may be considered as the last major figure to span both disciplines. He is reputed to have complained that the word "physicist" was so awkward to pronounce, unlike "chemist", which just rolls off the tongue.

   The attraction of this book to students and historians of science are the many unpublished letters. Now accessible to a much broader audience. You can get some insight into his mental workings. Plus, his correspondents include some towering figures in 19th century Britain. Isambard Brunel, Charles Babbage and others stride across this book in cameo appearances.

1 comments about Howard Carter.

1. The most completest biography about Howard Carter I 've ever read.Complete story through his successful but regretfu life.
   If you 've ever interested about The tomb of Tutankhamen and the man who spent his most of life on it.You should have this book.

5 comments about Edison: Inventing the Century.

1. I started this book with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm an Edison fan and figured I'd give it a go. But after the first 50 pages, I could not go on. The author's writing style made this book almost unreadable...and I have a master's degree. So it should have been a fun, easy read, right? Um. No. After run-on sentence after run-on sentence, each mixing sometimes three and four thoughts that would have to be re-read over just to come to some kind of understanding as to what was being referred to, and in the process, coming to some kind of conclusion that would lead one, impulsively, it could be argued, to start thinking in those terms, albeit wrong. So basically, the ENTIRE book is written like the crazy sentence that preceded this one. Get the idea? The author obviously did a lot of work. The editor must have been playing Tetris non-stop while proofing the manuscript. Yikes. Avoid.



2. I cannot recommend this book. The writing style was so boring and dry that I could not finish the book. You would think that the life of someone like Thomas Edison would be a naturally exciting read but Neil Baldwin somehow found a way of making the story boring. In contrast, I found the biography about Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow to be first-rate writing - Chernow's writing style immerses the reader into Hamilton's life - anything written by Ron Chernow is highly recommended. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing style, Neil Baldwin is no Ron Chernow



3. Marge Simpson (tired of Homer's endless prattling about Edison): I bet Thomas Edison didn't talk about Thomas Edison all day.
   Homer: Oh, that's not true Marge. He was a shameless self-promoter!
   
   This is a mammoth book that seeks to provide the entire story of the world's most famous inventor. Baldwin takes us from Edison's birth to his deathbed, with equal parts of attention being paid to his personal life and his professional life.
   
   Some people might be disappointed by the fact that Baldwin doesn't fawn over Edison the man, but I appreciated the objectivity. While Edison's famous work ethic and engineering genius earned him the mythic status that he holds in the public imagination, his home life was troubled, unsurprising for anyone who is at the top of their field. Bringing some of the less savory aspects of Edison into the light de-mythologizes him somewhat, but this is done in the service of truth, and I generally find that this makes for a better biography.
   
   I notice that other reviewers have criticized Baldwin's lack of science credentials, but I didn't find that to be a problem, either. Edison wasn't a scientist himself, in the sense that a nuclear physicist or a chemist is a scientist. Edison was an inventor. He made things, and the basis of his creations was generally not an abstract scientific concept that would be difficult for laymen to grasp. That being said, I do wish that there were some diagrams and sketches, which would have given us a more clear picture of the nuts and bolts of Edison's work.
   
   I was actually surprised to see the simplicity of most of Edison's inventions. It seemed that his real genius lay more in tinkering with an existing idea until the dream of a working practical application became reality.
   
   Another big surprise to me was how much of Edison's role depended on his ability to market himself. He and the media collaborated to give him an extremely high profile. While I don't want to belittle his amazing acheivements, his profile is much higher than others who, it can be argued, made equal or even greater contributions to society.
   
   My biggest problem with this work was that it was kind of boring. Baldwin has found some fascinating anecdotes and facts about Edison, but they are mixed in with too many dull details. The writing itself is generally quite dry, with more of a textbook atmosphere than some other successful modern nonfiction works.
   
   Despite this, there are some fascinating and bizarre aspects of Edison that Baldwin gives their due. For example, in Edison's old age, when his hearing went, his wife used to keep him up to date on the dinner conversation by tapping morse code onto his thigh. He also lived on almost nothing but milk and the occasional bit of bread for the last two years of his life.
   
   Overall, I would recommend this book to the person who is serious about getting the real story of Thomas Edison. If you're looking for a more entertaining read, or one which treads lightly around his mythic status, go elsewhere.



4. In this biography of the great inventor, Neil Baldwin chooses to emphasize Edison the person rather than focusing on the inventions, as some earlier biographers had done. Perhaps for this reason, though the book is thorough, it reads somewhat shallow. Of all the inventions of Edison, Baldwin writes in detail only about 2 of them: the phonograph and motion pictures. He also spends a great deal of space covering Edison's work in the iron ore mine he owned in Ogdensburg, NJ, and his experiments with rubber, both of which produced negligible results. I found Matthew Josephson's 1959 biography on Edison to be much better.



5. If this is your first look into Thomas Edison, find a different book. It was a constant struggle to finish this one, I had to force myself to go on. A cure for insomnia

No comments about Darwin's Lost Theory.