Robert P. Crease

A fascinating look at key thinkers throughout history who have shaped public perception of science and the role of authority. When does a scientific discovery become accepted fact? Why have scientific facts become easy to deny? And what can we do about it? In The Workshop and the World, philosopher and science historian Robert P. Crease answers these questions by describing the origins of our scientific infrastructure--the "workshop"--and the role of ten of the world's greatest thinkers in shaping it. At a time when the Catholic Church assumed total authority, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and René Descartes were the first to articulate the worldly authority of science, while writers such as Mary Shelley and Auguste Comte told cautionary tales of divorcing science from the humanities. The provocative leaders and thinkers Kemal Atatürk and Hannah Arendt addressed the relationship between the scientific community and the public in in times of deep distrust. As today's politicians and government officials increasingly accuse scientists of dishonesty, conspiracy, and even hoaxes, engaged citizens can't help but wonder how we got to this level of distrust and how we can emerge from it. This book tells dramatic stories of individuals who confronted fierce opposition--and sometimes risked their lives--in describing the proper authority of science, and it examines how ignorance and misuse of science constitute the preeminent threat to human life and culture. An essential, timely exploration of what it means to practice science for the common good as well as the danger of political action divorced from science, The Workshop and the World helps us understand both the origins of our current moment of great anti-science rhetoric and what we can do to help keep the modern world from falling apart.

What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us about Science and Authority

The Workshop and the World

The authors-- one a philosopher, the other a physicist-- draw on their training and six years of co-teaching to dramatize the quantum's rocky path from scientific theory to public understanding while also exploring the quantum's manifestations in everything from art and sculpture to the prose of John Updike and David Foster Wallace.

how Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg taught us to love uncertainty

The quantum moment

Charles C. Mann

The Second Creation is a dramatic--and human--chronicle of scientific investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. Robert Crease and Charles Mann take the reader on a fascinating journey in search of "unification" with brilliant scientists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and many others. They provide the definitive and highly entertaining story of the development of modern physics, and the human story of the physicists who set out to find the "theory of everything."

Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics

The Second Creation

Shares behind-the-scenes stories for ten of the most significant equations in human history, covering a range of topics, from Feynman's statement about Maxwell's pivotal electromagnetic equations and the influence of Newton's law of gravitation to the reason Euler's formula has been called "God's equation" and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. 20,000 first printing.

Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg

The Great Equations

Abraham Pais

An illuminating portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer chronicles the story of one of the most charismatic and enigmatic figures of modern physics, from his precocious youth to his seminal role in developing the first atomic bomb, and beyond.

A Life

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Alfred Scharff Goldhaber

"A very fun way to learn about where quantum physics comes from and the strange, even astonishing places it has gone." —Peter Galison, Harvard University, author of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps From multiverses and quantum leaps to Schrödinger’s cat and time travel, quantum mechanics has irreversibly shaped the popular imagination. Entertainers and writers from Lady Gaga to David Foster Wallace take advantage of its associations and nuances. In The Quantum Moment, philosopher Robert P. Crease and physicist Alfred Scharff Goldhaber recount the fascinating story of how the quantum jumped from physics into popular culture, with brief explorations of the underlying math and physics concepts and descriptions of the fiery disputes among figures including Einstein, Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr. Understanding and appreciating quantum imagery, its uses and abuses, is part of what it means to be an educated person in the twenty-first century. The Quantum Moment serves as an indispensable guide.

The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty

A philosopher and historian creates a thought-provoking odyssey through two millennia of scientific accomplishment, capturing ten key experiments that changed the world forever, from Eratosthenes's first measurement of Earth's circumference, to Foucault's pendulum, to Galileo's study of the speed of falling bodies, to the realm of quantum mechanics. 30,000 first printing.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science

The Prism and the Pendulum

Describes how the early-20th-century discoveries in quantum physics found their way into today's modern language and collective culture, appearing in everything from television shows and movies to coffee mugs and T-shirts to art forms like sculpture and prose. 20,000 first printing.

How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty

The Quantum Moment

From Nobel Prize-winning work in atomic physics to community concerns over radiation leaks, Brookhaven National Laboratory's ups and downs track the changing fortunes of "big science" in the United States since World War II. But Brookhaven is also unique; it was the first major national laboratory built specifically for basic civilian research. In Making Physics, Robert P. Crease brings to life the people, the instruments, the science, and the politics of Brookhaven's first quarter-century.

Robert P. Crease

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