Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 562 g
Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century
Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 562 g
ISBN: 978-0-19-536556-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press
If science has the equivalent of a Bloomsbury group, it is the five men born at the turn of the 20th century in the same neighborhood in Budapest: Theodore von Karman, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. Through immigration from Hungary to Germany to the United States, they remained friends and continued to work together and influence each other throughout their lives. As a result, their work was integral to some of the most important scientific and
political developments of the 20th century. They were an extraordinary group of talents: Wigner won a Nobel Prize in theoretical physics without ever having taken a formal college-level physics course, Szilard was the first to see that a chain reaction based on neutrons was possible but left physics to
try to restrict nuclear arms, von Neumann could solve problems in his head for which most people needed computers, von Karman became the first director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose name is now synonymous with the controversial "Star Wars" defense initiative of the 1980s. Each was fiercely opinionated and politically active, reactionaries against the fascism and anti-Semitism with which they had grown up. Istvan Hargittai, as a young
Hungarian physicist, was able to get to know these great men in their later years, and the depth of information and human interest in this book is the result of his personal relationships with the subjects, their families and their contemporaries.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
- Naturwissenschaften Physik Physik Allgemein Geschichte der Physik
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Human- und Sozialwissenschaften
- Naturwissenschaften Physik Physik Allgemein Experimentalphysik
- Naturwissenschaften Physik Physik Allgemein Theoretische Physik, Mathematische Physik, Computerphysik
