Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics by Mauro Dardo, Cambridge University Press. Hardback ISBN 0521832470, £70.00 ($110). Paperback ISBN 0521540089, £24.99 ($39.99).
Few would argue that the Nobel prize is an honour accorded to the greatest minds for outstanding discoveries. While I would not go quite as far as Mauro Dardo in the introduction ("these prizes are considered everywhere to be the most prestigious honours of our times, far outstripping... all others"), this statement sets the reverential tone maintained throughout this useful volume.
The book presents a straightforward chronology of the major themes that have shaped 20th-century physics in the context of the Nobel prizes awarded. The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the foundation of the prizes themselves, as well as some interesting tallies of the number of physics prizes awarded to particular nations and institutions. It is well known, for example, that the US has dominated the physics awards since the Second World War, but I was surprised to learn that it can boast a total of 77 laureates, with the UK in distant second place with 22 laureates.
Chapters two and three, in a mere 20 pages, cover physics up to the end of the 19th century, starting with Copernicus and ending with Maxwell. The level of detail is necessarily brief, and in an attempt to keep the book accessible to a wide audience Dardo avoids equations almost entirely - I noticed only a handful throughout the whole book. He also avoids technical diagrams, which could have helped to illustrate the experiments and observations. A simple diagram, for example, could help non-experts - who form part of the intended readership - to understand the interference of light rays from two slits.
Chapter three ends with an outline of the "vexing problems" that set the stage for the great discoveries of the early 20th century: the non-observation of the "ether", cathode rays, the black-body radiation spectrum, X-rays and radioactivity. Here, and throughout the book, Dardo adds useful paragraphs on the technology and inventions that form a vital context for the discoveries themselves.
The bulk of the book - some 430 pages in 10 chapters - is a straightforward and highly readable chronological account of the Nobel prize awards (and "near misses") between 1901 (Roentgen) and 2003 (Abrikosov, Ginzburg, Leggett). Most of the material will be very familiar to physics graduates, but it is useful to have it well laid out and clearly presented in a single volume.
My main disappointment is that only the briefest of biographical details are given about the laureates, and there are rather few "human" details to illustrate their personalities. However, these would lengthen the book further, and an extensive bibliography is supplied.
Paradoxically, the lack of equations and diagrams could make the narrative harder to follow for non-physicists, but the plain language and clear descriptions of (in some cases) complex phenomena render this book an excellent read for a long journey.
Philip Burrows, Queen Mary, University London.