Customer Reviews

The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein (Biography of Physics)

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I have read a fair amount of books on physics and found this one to be very enjoyable. Gamow keeps things pretty simple (until the end when he starts talking about his specialty) and very accessible. He is careful that the math is sequential; he always builds on previous examples to take you to the next step.

The book was published in the 60's, so there are many recent discoveries missing, but you need to know your history of physics to see how we got where we are. In fact, I found that this book showed just how new all of our current theories are and that there is promise for many new things on the horizon.

This book contained everything you could wish to know concerning just about every physicist that has had a major scientific contribution. This is a great book for intermediate scientific readers. I also liked that it had diagrams especially drawn by the author himself.

Gamow has long be revered as one of the original science "popularizers"--mostly because of his lucid and well trimmed writing style. This book is no different and it has the added bonus that Gamow actually knew most of the modern physicists--starting with Einstein--personally. It is worth buying for the great "kayak problem" in the relativity chapter alone, but has a wide range of different interesting tidbits, biographical information, and of course physics in Gamow's distinctive way. Well worth a read, especially for only $10.