Volume 29, Number 7 · April 29, 1982
Quantum Squabbles
By Rudolf Peierls
The Rise of Robert Millikan: Portrait of a Life in American Science
by Robert H. Kargon
Cornell University Press,, 205 pp., $22.50
Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
by Russell McCormmach
Harvard University Press,, 217 pp., $15.00
According to their authors, both books under review set out to portray an epoch in physics through the medium of a biography. The period dealt with is almost the same, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though one story extends into the Fifties, whereas the other ends effectively in 1918. One is about American physics, the other about German physics and physicists. But the main difference is that one author has chosen a real physicist, in fact one who contributed to the development of modern physics, whereas the other book is about an imaginary person.
Review, 2635 words
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