Recommendations from our site
“It’s a history book—by a physicist who shifted to doing history. It goes from the early 19th century up to the present (when it was published). It covers how the world wars, especially World War One, affected scientific research and looks at why the centre, especially of experimental physics, shifted to the United States. The book traces all the different threads—social, political, and, of course, scientific—of how physics went from being an outré subject in the 19th century, with only a few fairly eccentric people doing it, to people like James Maxwell, who were really getting into the nuts and bolts of things. Then, in the 20th century, it started getting a lot of support from people like Rockefeller, who were funding research…It’s very engagingly written, it’s very entertaining. You would think it would be a fairly dry book, it could even be an academic book, but it’s not at all, it’s very readable. I learned a lot” Read more...
The best books on The History of Physics
Mark Wolverton, Science Writer
