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This is a well-written biography of the tragic life of the brilliant scientist, Ludwig Boltzmann. Lindley paints a very intimate portrait of the scientist from within, rather than without, providing the reader with a close-up view of the peaks and ebbs of Boltzmann's checkered career and personal life. The author provides a cogent review of Boltzmann's contributions to thermodynamics, especially the development of kinetic theory. Most significantly, Boltzmann introduced a probabilistic interpret...
Good introduction of a time when 'atom' was a questionable entity, scientists were larger than life, Europe was at peace. It was nice to learn some personal information about people who's names we now associate only with constants, theories and scientific units.
Strange to see how persistent the opposition to atomic theory was, and how people like Mach turned into a sort of philosophy, not allowing physics to talk about anything that could not be dobserved directly. Also interesting how hard it was to assimilate the use of statistics to understand the behavior of large numbers of atoms. It's always worth being reminded how the most obvious ideas once seemed threatening.
I think I liked Uncertainty more but I felt like I had to read this one because he refers to it so often in his later book. Again it's interesting to see how scientists' personalities influence their research but I found this one a little drier than his other book.
Too much biography, not enough science. In fact, hardly any science. "Atom" is prominent in the title but very little in this book about what he did or discovered or why it was important.
This surprising history shows a perhaps forgotten era that set the stage for the early twentieth century revolution in physics, namely relativity and quantum mechanics. Prior to reading this account, I had imagined the work of Avogadro, Dalton, Mendeleev, and others had established atoms as facts. This book gives some detailed history mostly around Boltzmann showing how atomic theory was still controversial and not universally accepted. It was Boltzmann's dual skills in mathematics and physics t...
Written for a 'general audience,' this book gives the reader a lucid rendering of the issues physicists were debating in the late nineteenth century. The central issue of whether atoms existed or were merely useful fictions for calculating the behavior of gases is presented in its historical context, which takes some effort on the part of a twenty first century reader to get his mind back to the way people thought before the discovery of x-rays etc. The book's virtue is that it carried me back i...
Entertaining biographies about the famous political characters of history are often written, yet stories about the people behind the science are rare. Science does not exist in a vacuum any more than any other enterprise of the human creature. This book introduces us to some of the great thinkers of modern physics in their day to day lives, including the political revolutions going on in Europe approaching the first World War, as well as the personal emotional frailties and bickering amongst the...
An accessible guide to the development of philosophies of theoretical physics dressed up as a quasi-memoir.
Currently, I am on page 40. The whole of physics or life of Boltzmann described till this page can be written down in 4 or 5 pages. The rest is all about history of Vienna or history of ancient times. Let's see what's coming.I have now completed the book. The book is wonderful. It has combination of both physics and history. Increased rating by 1 star.
Great book from a great science writer. Who seems to be a little jealous if his subject matter character. :)
Amazing readVery well researched and written. Right mix of biography, history and physics. Recommended to anyone interested in the history of atomism.
