Knowledge and Wonder: The Natural World as Man Knows it - Hardcover

Victor Weisskopf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262230984 ISBN 13: 9780262230988

Publisher: MIT Press, 1979

Synopsis

More than 100,000 copies of the first edition of "Knowledge and Wonder" have been sold, both in the U.S. and abroad. Written expressly for the general reader and beginning science student, the book describes our present scientific understanding of natural phenomena and the universality of that understanding and its human significance.Contents Preface; Our Place in Space; Our Place in Time; Two Forces of Nature; Atoms; The Quantum; Chemistry; The Quantum Ladder; Life; Evolution; Epilogue; Index.

About this title

Review

"Weisskopf reviews, in depth, though with amazing succinctness and lucidity, the basic concepts of force, the nature of electricity, light, the atom, quanta, the nucleus, wave mechanics, complementarity, the chemical bond, mesons, and fields; next he works up to the molecules of living systems, protein, nucleic acids, DNA, RNA, and the origin of life and terminates with evolution and the emergence of man. A vast expanse of man's recent achievements is briefly scanned here, but the concepts are so clearly stated and so logically tied together that even the reader who is fully enlightened in these fields will enjoy the perspective and integration which the author achieves."-- "Science" "Weisskopf's aim is merely to sow the seed--wonder, the seed of knowledge--and he is eminently successful. This is a book for the nonscientific layman and for the high-school pupil of age fifteen or sixteen. It should be read before college. Let the physics major read it again...or the graduate student in another science even later still, they will also find it rewarding."-- "Physics Today"

From the Back Cover

In this new edition the chapter on chemistry has been largely rewritten and a great deal of new material has been added to the chapter on life. Also, the section on subnuclear phenomena has been brought up to date.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262230984
• ISBN 13: 9780262230988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 301