by Abraham Pais, Oxford University Press,
ISBN 0198506147, hbk £26.50.
The Genius of Science is the last of many books written by Abraham Pais, who died last year.
Pais was an eminent theoretical physicist who gradually became more and more interested in the history of science and produced the much acclaimed biographies of Einstein and Bohr. He was very interested in people and over the years accumulated a large number of friends, many of whom have made very important contributions to physics. Being an excellent speaker, Pais was often invited to address meetings organized in honour of his prestigious colleagues.
The extended versions of these talks make up most of the contents of this book, which Pais also calls A portrait gallery of twentieth-century physicists. Like all of Pais’s books, it is very readable and describes in more or less detail the work and characters of 17 physicists who have left their mark on the development of physics – Niels Bohr, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein, Mitchell Feigenbaum, Res Jost, Oskar Klein, Hendrik Kramers, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, Wolfgang Pauli, Isidor Rabi, Robert Serber, John von Neumann, Viktor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner and George Uhlenbeck.
The book is well researched and contains countless interesting anecdotes. One sees clearly that the best work is done by young researchers, and that theoretical physicists can be classified as either “golfers or tennis players” – the former do their creative work alone, while the latter are most creative when they can exchange ideas with others. Luckily, Pais was a tennis man who with this book shares with us his love of physics and his deep interest in people.
