Customer Reviews

Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

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This is an excellent book. Cropper must have put an enormous effort into researching and writing this 500 page, large format paperback, which has been nicely printed on white paper. At its current price of $12.97 an incredible bargain.

At first glance this book appears to be sort of a strange hybrid of biography and science, but the combo works. Cropper generally starts a chapter on a scientist with a few page biographical sketch followed by a longer, clearly written, physics section. I would estimate that the book is about 70% physics and about 30% biographical. The biographical sections are well done and interesting, but the book really shines in its overview of the physics.

Cropper covers 30 scientists with many of them in thermodynamics and atomic physics. Reading these sections you not only get a good overview of the science at a moderate technical level (a notch or two above the usual popular science writing level since Cropper is not afraid of using equations), but also you get an historical understanding of who did what and how their contributions fit together. Another plus is that Cropper will often describe in some detail how a key experiment has been done.

As a technical person (like a previous reviewer, I am an engineer), not only did I learn a lot from this book about how many of the secrets of this world have been discovered, but some of the gaps in my physics knowledge were filled in. Cropper set himself a big task to write an overview of much of physics, but he has pulled it off with style.

I've picked up many books over the years telling the stories of great scientists, but this is the only book of this type that I couldn't put down. I am a degreed engineer, now working in computers, with physics as a hobby. The coverage of Thermodynamics, which I have studied extensively, was fascinatingly rich and accessible. The complexity of other topics, such as nuclear physics, of which I know little, was surprizingly clear.

My curiosity attracts me to picking up compilations such as this, but I usually find them disjunct and uninteresting. Mr. Cooper has done an amazing job of weaving a coherent story of the lives of these fascinating characters spanning a history of 400 years.

As others have stated this is an excellent summary of the history of physics. The mix of biographical background and technical overview is very well done.
I was disappointed only in the section on relativity which diminished the roles of Lorentz, Poincare and Minkowski. Unlike the section on thermodynamics, which traces the development of key ideas among several important players, Cropper seems to present Einstein as having developed the ideas of special relativity in a historical vacuum. For example, the key equation of relativity, the Lorentz transformation, is mentioned only in passing as having been developed by Lorentz. The mathematical structure of special relativity, developed by Minkowski, is also mentioned in passing. I would liked to have learned a little more about the lives of these important contributors. In general, these three figures (Lorentz, Poincare and Minkowski) deserved more attention than provided by Cropper.
The sections on the development of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics provide as good a historical summary as I have ever read.

I received it as a present and I found it much better than I expected. The book tracks the progress of physics and some cosmology (with a dash of chemistry) from Galileo through the 20th century.

The format of the book is broken down into sections dealing with a topic (i.e. thermodynamics, particle physics) and then by chapter dealing with the biography of a scientist. The chapters roughly follow the format of biography, the science, and ending with later life / legacy / thoughts. But Cropper does not hold rigidly to this chapter format. Some scientists get mini biographies embedded into the chapters of others (Hetz, Otto Hahn) and some prolific scientists work outside of their "primary field" shows up in the chapters about other scientists; Maxwell's thermodynamic work appears in Boltzmann's in the Statistical Mechanics section. If one reads the book straight through this has the effect a making for a smoother narrative. If one is just looking up a single scientist this leads to some index work.

The biographies, while tertiary overviews based on longer works, are well done summaries. They are not overly romanticized accounts, and acknowledge personality flaws as well as strengths. The contributions of families and wives are also well noted, as well as when they are blown off or even betrayed.

A great advantage of this book as an overview is that Cropper is willing to put equations in the text, unlike some popular books about physics. The equations are not difficult, and can be understood by anyone who has taken middle school algebra. There are some calculus symbols that show up, but these are explained in the chapter on Newton. I was disappointed that the amount of math drops off in the later chapters. Some of this is understandable, the mathematical tools get more complex, but when he writes about Schrödinger's equation, I would really like to see the equation (in some form).

The only other, slightly unreasonable, complaint is that there are a number of physicists that are skipped over. For example those who worked on Mechanics after Newton, such as Laplace and Hamilton, or those who followed up on Relativity are given only passing reference. However, the book is 500 pages, trying to fit more will become unwieldy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a general interest in science, or a teenager who is enthusiastic about physics. The book is long but is broken up into bite sized pieces, most chapters are under 15 pages, and are further broken up into sections of a half page to two pages.

This is not a page-turner; in spurts, you'll have to study. The book includes brief biographies of 30 physicists from Galileo to Hawking, along with descriptions of each subject's science, often with diagrams and a bit of math. I liked the book's continuity: scientific descriptions often link to what went before and what is to come.

Recommended for anyone who wants historical perspective in physics and who doesn't mind some diagrams and some gentle math. If you read this book, you will have to think, but you don't have to be a scientist to cope with it.

This is the best book I have read about the human side of physicists. Although, I have a Masters degree in physics, you don't need to be a practicing scientist to throughly enjoy the contents of this wonderful work. Cropper did an outstanding writing job.

I found this book to be just excellent, in every respect. If you want to read about the history of history and also get a consise yet excellent explanation of the physics that each physicts created, then this is your book. This is why I refer to it as "Cliff Notes of Physics through the history of Physics". It's very clearly written.

This is a great book. It is part biography and part physics (mostly the evolution of different disciplines). It is divided into sections covering: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, Statistical Mechanics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear Physics, and Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology. Each of the 29 chapters focuses on a different Physicist, with additional biographical information on others who interacted with the subject of the chapter.

I have read several other books on "Great Scientists" but this is far and away the best. Most of the others were largely superficial, focusing on the man (or in a few cases women). These other books generally had a lot of illustrations that added very little to the text and provided few details about the scientific work of the person being profiled. This book is different; its focus is more on physics, with the illustrations limited to a portrait or photograph of the subject of the chapter and any figures are limited to diagrams that support the physics being discussed. In some chapters the text is only 20% biography with 80% physics, but in others there is somewhat more biography (perhaps as much as 60-80%). There are great discussions spread throughout the book that clarified a lot for me. For instance, there is a half page discussion of symmetry and conservation laws that did more to clarify this idea than the other general physics books that I have read; likewise for the discussion of Hawking Radiation.

I particularly liked the section of thermodynamics. This subject is often overlooked in other books on scientists. Cropper (who is a physical chemist) shows the evolution of thermodynamics and how it was refined from scientist to scientist. Seeing how the discipline evolved was very helpful and provided a very good foundation for this important subject. While very good, the other sections were not quite as thorough. I found the quantum mechanics section to be somewhat weak; it was good, but not as good as the thermodynamics section. In fact, I found it somewhat superficial in that it did not get into the implications of quantum reality and described the uncertainty principle completely in terms of it being an experimental problem. Heisenberg used this idea, but I think that it tends to obscure the mathematics that generated the uncertainty principle and the degree to which it may reflect the underlying nature of reality. There is a lot of physics in this book; all treated in a general manner that does not compromise the importance of the ideas.

This book contains some mathematical equations (there is even a general section of vector analysis), but does not require any actual problem solving or the use of these equations. This is a great book for college physics, chemistry and engineering majors, as well as practicing scientists and engineers. However, it may be beyond most high school students. For the right reader this is a terrific book. I loved it!

this book has the perfect mixture of science and personal details, i am doing an assignment on history of science and it provided exactly what i was looking for. i would definitely recommend it for someone who wants to know not just the progress of physics and thermodynamics but also all the background controversies and the personal triumphs and tragedies that went along with it. in the end you'll feel a lot more familiar with all those great names that people usually just associate with a theorem.

Good (93-page) section of thermodynamics' history. An inaccuracy, however, occurs on page 107, where Cropper states "Clausius appears to have made no comment on Gibbs's work." Correctly, in 1875, Clausius refers to his (seemingly favored) Gibbs use of the term "isentropic" (pg. 68, The Mechanical Theory of Heat, 2nd ed.), for expansions where the entropy remains constant.