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The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
Graham Farmelo · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorRadioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout
Lauren Redniss · 205 pages
Presents the professional and private lives of Marie and Pierre Curie, examining their personal struggles, the advancements they made in the world of science, and the issue of radiation in the modern world.
The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell
Basil Mahon · 246 pages
This is the first biography in twenty years of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists of our time and yet a man relatively unknown to the wider public. Approaching science with a freshness unbound by convention or previous expectations, he produced some of the most original scientific thinking of the nineteenth century ? and his discoveries went on to shape the twentieth century.
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
James Gleick · 532 pages
A gem of a book, about the life and mind of one of the most influential and iconoclastic characters in 20th century physics. Really a pleasure to read.
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson · 704 pages
The first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. Biographer Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk--a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate--became the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom an
Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family
Shelley Emling · 237 pages
"Marie Curie was the first person to be honored by two Nobel Prizes and she pioneered the use of radiation therapy for cancer patients. But she was also a mother, widowed young, who raised two extraordinary daughters alone: Irene, a Nobel Prize winning chemist in her own right, who played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, and Eve, a highly regarded humanitarian and journalis
Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
Jennet Conant · 352 pages
"In the fall of 1940, as German bombers flew over London and with America not yet at war, a small team of British scientists on orders from Winston Churchill carried out a daring transatlantic mission. The British unveiled their most valuable military secret in a clandestine meeting with American nuclear physicists at the Tuxedo Park mansion of a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis.
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth
Paul Hoffman · 301 pages
"Paul Erdos, the most prolific and eccentric mathematician of our time, forsook all creature comforts - including a hometo pursue his lifelong study of numbers. He was a man who possessed unimaginable powers of thought yet was unable to manage some of the simplest daily tasks." "For more than six decades, Erdos lived out of two tattered suitcases, crisscrossing four continents at a frenzied pace,
Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
David Lindley · 272 pages
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.--Werner HeisenbergThat God would choose to play dice with the world is something I cannot believe.--Albert EinsteinNothing exists until it is measured.--Neils BohrThe remarkable story of a startling scientific idea that ignited a battle among the greatest minds of the twentieth
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love
Dava Sobel · 420 pages
A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and LoveInspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter, which she has translated into English for the first time, Dava Sobel has written a book of great originality and power, a biography unlike any ever written on the man Albert Einstein called “the father of modern physics – indeed of modern science al
The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor
John McPhee · 233 pages
Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.
Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein
Abraham Pais, Roger Penrose · 560 pages
A biography of Albert Einstein, told through various scientific and technical correspondences, including those with Michele Besso. Pais discusses the world of physics before Einstein, during Einstein's time and the impact on the scientific world after his death.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin · 721 pages
Biography of American physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors
John Gribbin · 647 pages
Passionate Minds
David Bodanis · 373 pages
"It was 1733 when the poet and philosopher Voltaire met Emilie du Chatelet, a beguiling - and married - aristocrat who would one day popularize Newton's arcane ideas and pave the way for Einstein's theories. In an era when women were rarely permitted any serious schooling, this twenty-seven-year-old's nimble conversation and unusual brilliance led Voltaire, then in his late thirties, to wonder, "W
On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein
Jennifer Berne · 56 pages
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
Barbara Goldsmith · 320 pages
Draws on diaries, letters, and family interviews to discuss the lesser-known achievements and scientific insights of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, documenting how she was compromised by the prejudices of a male-dominated society.
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics
John Derbyshire · 435 pages
Archimedes and the Door of Science
Jeanne Bendick · 145 pages
Against the backdrop of Archimedes' life and culture, the author discusses the man's work, his discoveries and the knowledge later based upon it.
Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World
Rachel Swaby · 273 pages
"Covering Nobel Prize winners and major innovators, as well as lesser-known but hugely significant scientists who influence our every day, Rachel Swaby's ... profiles span centuries of courageous thinkers and illustrate how each one's ideas developed, from their first moment of scientific engagement through the research and discovery for which they're best known"--Page 4 of cover.
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics
Marcus du Sautoy · 351 pages
A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
Palle Yourgrau · 217 pages
It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is the
The Invention of Air
Steven Johnson · 254 pages
Bestselling author Steven Johnson recounts—in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion—the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America’s Founding Fathers. The Invention of Air is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change th
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
David Quammen · 304 pages
"Charles Darwin was by nature a homebody, a breeder of pigeons, a close student of barnacles--in short, a cautious and deeply shy man. Yet he found himself burdened with a profoundly radical insight. This elusive character, whose theories have had such a revolutionizing impact on our understanding of nature, remains as misapprehended as his most wondrous, frightening idea: "natural selection," the