Quantum Profiles

Bernstein, Jeremy

ISBN 10: 0691087253 / ISBN 13: 9780691087252

Published by Princeton Univ Pr, Princeton, NJ, 1991

About this Item

First Printing. Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket. Publisher's full black cloth, gilt (silver) lettering on spine. Black endpapers. 8vo. 178 pp. Includes bibliographical references and Index. This is a new, unopened, unmarked copy. Both the volume and the dust jacket are in perfect, pristine condition. AS NEW/AS NEW. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 4965

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Quantum Profiles
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr, Princeton, NJ
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691087253
• ISBN 13: 9780691087252
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition Thus. 1.
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography & Memoir
  • Science, Medicine & Technology

About this title

Synopsis

For the prominent science writer Jeremy Bernstein, the profile is the most congenial way of communicating science. Here, in what he labels a "series of conversations carried on in the reader's behalf and my own," he evokes the tremendous intellectual excitement of the world of modern physics, especially the quantum revolution. Drawing on his well-known talent for explaining the most complex scientific ideas for the layperson, Bernstein gives us a lively sense of what the issues of quantum mechanics are and of various ways in which individual physicists approached them.

The author begins this series of interconnected profiles by describing the life and work of John Stewart Bell, the brilliant physicist employed at the gigantic elementary particle laboratory near Geneva (CERN), whose "Bell's Inequality" inspired a generation of researchers to confront, by experiment, just how peculiar and counterintuitional quantum mechanics really is. Bernstein then discusses the career of the prodigiously active and creative John Archibald Wheeler, who worked in the beginning stages of almost every branch of contemporary physics and invented the terms "black hole," "ergo-sphere," "geon," "Planck length," and "stellarator." The book closes with a moving commentary on the correspondence, of fifty-two years duration, between Einstein and the gentle, talented, but little-known Swiss engineer Michele Angelo Besso. "Of all the Einstein letters I have read these are surely the most striking, on a purely human level," writes Bernstein of the Einstein-Besso correspondence. "Einstein was not given to close friendships--`the merely personal,' as he once put it--but these letters are filled with `the merely personal,' even though the deep issues of physics and its philosophy are never very far away."

Review

"Fascinating to read ... provides a valuable addition to an important debate about our understanding of the universe at its most fundamental level."--The New York Review of Books

"A collection of three warm, colorful and insightful profiles of physicists who have contributed to the study of quantum mechanics."--The Washington Times