by William H Cropper, OUP, ISBN 0 19 513748 5, £24.95.
Physics is the study and formulation by physicists of how nature works. Without physicists, nature would still work but there would be nothing to describe it. Few, even among the physics community, know much about physicists, other than some hype about cult figures like Einstein, Feynman and Hawking.
Only a handful of geniuses, active at a time when their talents can bear fruit, can achieve the milestone discoveries or reveal the new insights that make science history. Here, William Cropper provides biographical snapshots of 30 famous physicists (in 29 chapters – Erwin Schrödinger and Louis de Broglie share a bed), extending through time from Galileo to Hawking, who was born on 8 January 1942, exactly 300 years after Galileo’s death. Hawking himself has remarked on this coincidence, and the fact that these dates provide the parameters of this study reflects the book as a whole.
The portraits are drawn from standard biographies, and those who are acquainted with these works will find nothing new. As Cropper explains in his preface, “No claim is made that this is a comprehensive or scholarly study…Read these chapters casually and for entertainment, and learn the lesson that science is a human endeavour.”
The first section covers the giant figures of Galileo and Newton, who centuries later still tower over the subject. Subsequent sections deal with thermodynamics (from Carnot to Nernst); 19th-century electromagnetism (Faraday and Maxwell); statistical mechanics (Boltzmann alone); relativity (Einstein supreme); quantum mechanics; nuclear physics (Curie, Rutherford, Meitner, and Fermi); particle physics (Dirac, Feynman and Gell-Mann); and astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology (Hubble, Chandrasekhar and Hawking). Most of the book, therefore, deals with 20th-century figures.
The cast of characters is Cropper’s choice and spans the whole spectrum of personality and destiny: tragic figures like Boltzmann, victims of fate like Meitner and Planck, ascetics like Dirac, the flamboyant Feynman, intellectual aristocrats like Gell-Mann and simple geniuses like Rutherford.
The book’s subjects include two women (Curie and Meitner) but are mainly confined to Europe and North America. The exceptions are Chandrasekhar, born in India, who spent his research career in Europe and the US; and Rutherford, born in New Zealand, who spent his research career in England and Canada. There are no Russians, which is a pity, considering the wealth of contributions to physics made by scientists in that country and who have been well represented by Nobel awards.
Each biographical snapshot is prefaced by a useful summary, before a fuller account and an appraisal of the science (including some assimilable equations). Each is also labelled by a thumbnail portrait illustration, but otherwise there are no photographs of events (other than a bubble chamber). There is a separate chronology of the main events of the period covered, but there is no systematic indication of exact dates of birth and death, such as in Asimov’s work.
However, Cropper has done physics a great service by compiling this book, which compresses between two covers valuable material that would otherwise need a small library.
