Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist - Hardcover

Mccormmach, Robert.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674624602 ISBN 13: 9780674624603

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1982

Synopsis

Victor Jakob, an old physics professor in World War I Germany, tries to come to terms with the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics

About this title

Review

"Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist is an artful experiment in writing the history of science. The book is a sort of prose poem, consisting of the ruminations--part memory, part dream--of the fictional Victor Jakob, an elderly theoretical physicist at a minor Prussian university, who in September 1918 broods over his career through the nights preceding his death. In passages of luminous simplicity, Jakob contemplates the intellectual upheavals in science from the creation of the German Empire in 1870 to its collapse in 1918, from the reign of classical physicists to the revolutions produced by the relativity and quantum theories...[This] is a sensitive and compelling work about the confrontation of a classical spirit with the raw disorders of the modern scientific age. A brilliant piece of scholarship and a profoundly moving portrait of a man and his time. -- Peter Stoler "Time" I should like to recommend this book to a large audience...for its charm, its intensity, and its scholarship. -- Laurie M. Brown "Science" "Night Thoughts" is an interdisciplinary adventure, designed to entice the reluctant general reader into the unfamiliar terrain of physics; to lure the wary specialist out of the laboratory and away from the blackboard, into the world of fantasy... McCormmach's prose acquires an emotional breadth and intellectual depth seldom achieved by the novelist...An innovative and often lyrical book, written with a physicist's precision and a poet's intensity. -- Elaine Kendall "Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist" is an artful experiment in writing the history of science. The book is a sort of prose poem, consisting of the ruminations--part memory, part dream--of the fictional Victor Jakob, an elderly theoretical physicist at a minor Prussian university, who in September 1918 broods over his career through the nights preceding his death. In passages of luminous simplicity, Jako Y contemplates the intellectual upheavals in science from the creation of the German Empire in 1870 to its collapse in 1918, from the reign of classical physicists to the revolutions produced by the relativity and quantum theories... This is a sensitive and compelling work about the confrontation of a classical spirit with the raw disorders of the modern scientific age. -- Daniel J. Kevles "New York Times Book Review"

From the Back Cover

'A sensitive and compelling work about the confrontation of a classical spirit with the raw disorders of the modern scientific age.'---Daniel J. Kevles, New York Times Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0674624602
• ISBN 13: 9780674624603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230