Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces
in the Physical World by Abraham
Pais
An Excellent History Of Physics For Physicists
Abraham Pais Subtle is the Lord...--the award-winning biography of Albert
Einstein--received high acclaim from The New York Times Book Review
which hailed it as a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style,
and from The Christian Science Monitor which called it an extraordinary
biography of an extraordinary man. In his groundbreaking new book,
Pais chronicles the history of the physics of matter and physical forces
since the discovery of x-rays. He relates not only what has happened over
the last one-hundred years, but also why it happened the way it did, the
experiences of the scientists involved, and how a series of seemingly
bizarre or unrelated occurrences has emerged as a logical sequence of
discoveries and events. Personally involved in many of the developments
described, Pais provides unique insights into the world of big and small
physics, revealing how the smallest distances explored between 1895 and
1983 have shrunk a hundred millionfold. Along this road inward, scientists

have made advances that later generations will rank among the principal
monuments of the twentieth century. This magisterial survey explores the
discoveries made on the constituents of matter, the laws that govern them,
and the forces that act on them. Demonstrating the sometimes rocky road
to new insights, Pais reveals that these have been times of progress and
stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and
incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre, as well as of
revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by
consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big
moneys.
Personal Review: Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the
Physical World by Abraham Pais
It is 8 November 1895 in the late afternoon and you are a physicist working
in France, feeling somewhat dysphoric because everything that is
knowable in Physics has been discovered, and the world and its clockwork
mechanism explained and codified in a series of brilliant differential
equations. All that remains is to dot a few i's and then the great course of
knowledge begun by Galileo and brought to perfection by Newton will be
complete. You are performing some experiments with a mysterious
substance that intrigues you: cathode rays. Your main apparatus is a one
meter long vacuum tube, its pressure reduced to one-thousandth of a torr.
In your hand you hold a small apparatus at some distance from the tube
and which you wave in a slow, desultory fashion. You are not expecting
anything, frankly you are feeling a little bored. But you are curious and
perhaps the nature of these cathode rays will reveal themselves.
Suddenly, you are quite startled to notice a fluorescence on the device you
are waving, a detector or small screen covered with barium platinocyanide.
The fluorescence is caused by the cathode rays. You are determined to
discover the nature of this mysterious substance.
Your name is Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen and that fluorescence you have
discovered is what the world would soon know as X-rays, a term you
invent for your first paper. You quickly learn that these rays have the
extraordinary effect of penetrating matter, allowing you to take astonishing
photographs of the bones of the hand. Reports of these photos cause a
sensation in the world press in January 1896. And when Le Matin
publishes a story on X-rays on 13 January, another French scientist, by the
name of Henri Becquerel, is stirred to begin his own experiments with rays.
Eventually he decides to expose rocks to the sun. His experiments are
sidetracked, however, when he accidently photographs a key with the rays
given off by a piece of uranium-bearing ore called pitchblende that had
never been exposed to the sun. His astonishment causes him to rush
across the hall and invite Pierre Curie and a young female student named
Marie, who is working in his laboratory, to witness this strange event. They
in turn are induced to discover the nature of these strange and powerful
rays, now known as radiactivity. Their work is instrumental in Max Planck's
explanation of black-body radiation (radiation is discretely emitted in

quanta of energy), which catches the eye of Albert Einstein who explains
the photoelectric effect in 1905, for which he wins the Nobel prize in 1921.
With such a dizzying chain of events, the notion at the end of the 19th
Century that Classical Physics was complete was repudiated and a new,
much more radical view of nature was inaugurated. Abraham Pais, a
physicist who knew many of the actors, author of Subtle is the Lord, the
brilliant biography of Einstein, has written one of the finest histories of
science I've ever read. It offers an encyclopedic overview of the
development of elementary particle physics from 1895 and Roentgen's
discovery of X-rays until the discovery of W and Z Bosons in 1983 by Carlo
Rubbia and the researchers at CERN: a history from X to Z. It is also a
brilliant and engaging portrait of the physicists who profoundly deepened
our understanding of matter and physical forces. It is told in chronological
order, with scientific depth (including significant equations) and a sure
knowledge of every major event and discovery in the nearly one hundred
years with which the book is concerned. During that period, the smallest
distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold. This book will
reward those with some knowledge of physics, but can be read selectively,
without significant loss of content, by those whose knowledge of science is
rudimentary at best. This is indeed a sweeping narrative that places the
great discoveries in atomic physics of the last century at your fingertips
and is most strongly recommended.
Mike Birman
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