"In December 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved a milestone in human history: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi, the father of the nuclear age. But as David N. Schwartz shows in this groundbreaking biography, Fermi's impact goes well beyond this epochal event. With his theory of beta decay and his development of quantum statistics, Fermi revolutionized modern physics. Straddling the...

Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called the Pope by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the...

An illuminating portrayal of Richard Feynman - a giant of twentieth century physics - from his childhood tinkering with radios, to his vital work on the Manhattan Project and beyond. Raised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic - a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the...

On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science,...

As a young man Frank Oppenheimer followed in his famous brother's footsteps--growing up in a privileged Manhattan household, becoming a physicist, working on the atomic bomb. Tragically, Frank and Robert both had their careers destroyed by the Red Scare, but their paths diverged. While Robert died an almost ruined man, Frank came into his own, emerging from ten years of exile on a Colorado ranch to create not just a multimillion dollar institution...

Oppenheimer was a puzzle to everyone. The nuclear physicist most responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb, he was a genius both scientifically and otherwise. His standards were impossibly high. He read widely in many languages, wrote poetry, and did superb science. Yet in this biographical memoir, Oppenheimer emerges as a man unsure of his identity and captive to an element of self-destructiveness in his makeup. As a former colleague of Oppenheimer's....