Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology - Hardcover

Segre, Gino

4.04

100 ratings by Goodreads

9780670022762: Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670022764 ISBN 13: 9780670022762

Publisher: Viking Pr, 2011

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A biography of two maverick scientists whose intellectual wanderlust kick-started modern genomics and cosmology.

Max Delbruck and George Gamow, the so-called ordinary geniuses of Segre's third book, were not as famous or as decorated as some of their colleagues in midtwentieth-century physics, yet these two friends had a profound influence on how we now see the world, both on its largest scale (the universe) and its smallest (genetic code). Their maverick approach to research resulted in truly pioneering science.

Wherever these men ventured, they were catalysts for great discoveries. Here Segre honors them in his typically inviting and elegant style and shows readers how they were far from "ordinary". While portraying their personal lives Segre, a scientist himself, gives readers an inside look at how science is done--collaboration, competition, the influence of politics, the role of intuition and luck, and the sense of wonder and curiosity that fuels these extraordinary minds.

Ordinary Geniuses will appeal to the readers of Simon Singh, Amir Aczel, and other writers exploring the history of scientific ideas and the people behind them.

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Review:

Segre spins a rousing tale of scientific thought and adventure. And like his subjects, he makes a convincing case for approaching new problems with a sense of wonder.

--Publisher s Weekly

An exuberant dual biography that integrates developments in quantum physics, cosmology and genetics since the 1920s with the lives of these two scientists.

--Kirkus Reviews

Gino Segre s fascinating dual biography of George Gamow and Max Delbruck, Ordinary Geniuses. Gamow was a theoretical physicist who made an interesting foray into the biology of protein synthesis, while Delbruck was a theoretical physicist who became a biologist and then won the Nobel Prize for his work in genetics.

--Wall Street Journal

In parallel chapters Segre has sensitively and insightfully narrated chronologically Delbruck and Gamow s personal and professional lives. And while doing so, he has clearly presented and explained their scientific contributions; the prior works on which they were based; and their present day importance and relevance.

--American Scientist

Segre convincingly shows how the pair s maverick personalities led to their discoveries, while their restlessness often stopped them seeing their ideas to maturity.

--New Scientist

Ordinary Geniuses makes me wistfully wonder if the world will ever again witness the coming together of such fun-loving intellectual brilliance.
James D. Watson, author of The Double Helix

George Gamow and Max Delbruck were free spirits and practical jokers. They broke away from the mainstream of science in the 1930s and found new ways of thinking that opened the way to new sciences in the 1950s. George invented Big Bang cosmology, and Max invented molecular biology. This book brings them magnificently to life. It gives us a fresh view of the way new sciences are born.
Dr. Freeman Dyson, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study

Ordinary Geniuses is no ordinary book. Gino Segre, a masterly storyteller, takes us off the beaten path to view two revolutions in twentieth-century science from a novel perspective. By chronicling the lives of two renegade scientists, Max Delbruck and George Gamow, Segre puts the birth of both molecular biology and modern cosmology in a whole new light. An engaging read.
Marcia Bartusiak, author of The Day We Found the Universe

Gino Segre is an accomplished scientist, a gifted writer, and a meticulous scholar. His talents come together in this wonderful book, the story of the intertwining careers of two quite amazing scientists. But it is more. It is a loving ode to twentieth-century science and will enthrall as it instructs.
Kenneth W. Ford, author of 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can't See; former director, American Institute of Physics

A marvelous book. Segre describes vividly how Delbruck helped to establish the new science of molecular biology while Gamow went into cosmology and originated our current view of the Big Bang. They both left major impressions on science as might be expected from ordinary geniuses.
Alex Rich, Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at M.I.T.

About the Author:

Gino Segr� is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. An internationally renowned expert in high-energy elementary-particle theoretical physics, Segr� has served as director of Theoretical Physics at the National Science Foundation and received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. This is his first book.

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