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Mr. Tompkins in Paperback
Purchase options and add-ons
- ISBN-100521447712
- ISBN-13978-0521447713
- PublisherCambridge University Press (Canto Imprint)
- Publication dateMarch 26, 1993
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.63 x 8.46 inches
- Print length186 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
'Will vastly fascinate the whimsical, and is also entirely scientific.' Scientific American
'Enthusiastically recommended to both scientific and general readers.' The Guardian
Book Description
Book Description
Product details
- Publisher : Cambridge University Press (Canto Imprint) (March 26, 1993)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 186 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0521447712
- ISBN-13 : 978-0521447713
- Item Weight : 9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.63 x 8.46 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,972,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #238 in Physics of Gravity (Books)
- #9,288 in Political Leader Biographies
- #20,024 in Mathematics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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A very advisable book. Written with great ingenious by one great physicist. It explains in a very simple way some of the ideas behind the modern physics following the life of one character (Mr Tompkins) that is involved with other characters representing some physicists that made the foundation of the modern physics, for example Pauli with some other name disguised as a minister of the electrons. Pleasant book.
Despite the elegiac introduction by Roger Penrose, I found the book much less charming and engaging now at 76 than I did then at 16. Sixty years can do that! The stories now seemed quaint and dated--not so much their scientific content as their social mise-en-scene. Tompkins seems a bore; I couldn't help but wonder what Maud saw in him. And her scientific naivete, despite being the daughter of a professor of physics and thus presumably exposed to his work throughout her childhood, seems inexplicable, even if of a piece with her addiction to fashion magazines. (But then, Tompkins reads "Esquire." But I did too, in the days when it regularly published new work by important writers.)
The high point of the book for me was when the beetle-browed Edward Teller (whom Gamow calls "Tallerkin"--why? Was he afraid of libel? But the identity of the subject is certain) absent-mindedly begins to deliver a speech in Hungarian to an American audience. The content of the speech is totally in character for Teller: it's about how important he is.










