Customer Reviews

From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves: Classical Physicists and Their Discoveries

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This is a splendid little book. In less than 300 pages Emilio Segre takes us from Galileo to the end of the nineteenth century with the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann, Maxwell, Gibbs and van der Wals. The strength of this book is the way Segre illuminates the relationships between the thoughts of the great and not quite great physicists of the three centuries he covers. Segre was Enrico Fermi's right hand man and a Noble laurete so he knows the physics backward and forwards. Even better, he knows how scientists relate to each other. Quoting extensively from contemporary documents, Segre illustrates cooperation and competition, respect and disdain, lost work and unrecognized knowledge, running through the growth of the fundemental ideas of physics. He mentions enough history to provide cultural context but the development of the ideas is the driving theme. The treatment of the individual physicists is humane and pyschologically perceptive. The physical ideas are explained clearly, at least to an engineer like me, with a minimum of mathematics in the text. There are mathematical appendices, used well, that don't become too daunting until the late flowering of statistical mechanics is being explicated.

Really, I can't think of a better short historical survey of the great ideas of physics, especially since there is a good topical bibliography current up to the 1984 date of publication. Highly recommended.

Emilio Segre wrote FROM X-RAYS TO QUARKS, which covers the development of physics from the 1890s to the 1970s, physics that was breaking news for his teachers and then for him. In FROM FALLING BODIES TO RADIO WAVES, Segre picks up the background story starting with Galileo, who first brought the full force of mathematics, rationality, and experiment to bear on physics. This book carries through to the contributions of Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs, bringing it up to the beginning of X-RAYS TO QUARKS.

Segre tells you not just what these scientists did, but how they did it and who they were. Galileo was a hero of Segre's from age fifteen, when Segre labored over the Dialogues on Two World Systems in Tivoli, near Rome. Segre gives a positive and sensitive account of Galileo's struggles with the Church as well of his scientific achievements. Likewise, Segre tells you of Newton's achievements and of his disputes, dark moods, and depressions. And so on for all of the physicists and mathematicians covered in this book.

For those with some calculus, there are nice derivations of key results in the Appendices.

The Preface and Conclusions are not to be missed. In his Conclusions, Segre shows how theoretical insights allowed us to sharpen our focus on essentials by giving a deeper understanding of the subject. He writes:

"... [A] standard German treatise that around 1890 occupied three or four volumes filled ten times as much space as in its 1925 edition."

"At the time of Napoleon (i.e., around 1800) the the means of transportation, communication, night lighting, prime movers, and other aids to everyday life were not much different from those of the ancient Romans. One hundred years later, mankind had railroads, telegraphs, electric lighting, electric motors, and dynamos. It is no wonder that such achievements should have excited the wave of optimism that pervaded popularizers at the turn of the [twentieth] century."

Highly recommended. See also FROM X-RAYS TO QUARKS, and Segre's autobiography, A MIND ALWAYS IN MOTION.

This is a wonderful book. Don't miss it. See also "From X-Rays to Quarks" from the same author.