Gino Segrè

Bettina Hoerlin

"The first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, Enrico Fermi. Enrico Fermi is unquestionably the most famous scientist to come from Italy since Galileo, so revered that he's known as The Pope of Physics. A modest, unassuming man, Fermi was nevertheless one of the most productive and creative scientists of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of the Atomic Bomb and a Nobel Prize winner whose contributions to physics and nuclear technology live on today, with the largest particle accelerator in the United States and the nation's most significant science and technology award both bearing his name. In this, the first major biography of Fermi in English, Gino Segre, professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, brings this scientific visionary to life. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi's life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century--including the birth of one of its most controversial disciplines, nuclear physics--this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves"--

Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age

The Pope of Physics

Documents the 1932 gathering of some forty of the world's top names in physics, placing the meeting against a backdrop of key scientific developments while citing the contributions of specific figures and offering insight into how their unsuspecting collaborations gave way to subsequent historical events.

A Struggle for the Soul of Physics

Faust in Copenhagen

Theorizes that temperature is the most revealing method of measurement, considering such topics as the fixed internal temperature of most mammals, the significance of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and the problem of superconductivity in quantum physics. Reprint.

What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe

A Matter of Degrees

In 1932, the so-called annus mirabilis of modern physics, a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen for a week-long conference on the extraordinary new work that was taking place in laboratories across the world; work that would ultimately lead to the development of nuclear weapons and the ensuing international power struggles. Segrè's erudite and impressive account explores this crucial moment in history through the lives and careers of seven physicists sitting in the front row of the Copenhagen meeting. Six of them were already in the pantheon of genius while the seventh - Max Delbrück - was the author of a skit performed at the conference that lightly parodied the struggle between the old and new theories of physics and eerily foreshadowed the events that were to unfold in the struggle between peaceful uses of scientific discovery and destructive ones.

A Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age

Faust In Copenhagen

In April 1932, about 40 young scientists attended Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Institute for their freewheeling physics conference. This work centres on the lives and careers of physicists sitting in the front row at the Copenhagen meeting - Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac.

Gino Segrè

About

Books

Join the club