Physicists will be bolstered by Lindley’s bottom line: Like Boltzmann, theorizing is okay. Science buffs may need to have...
A tribute to the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose early work “laid the groundwork” for quantum and chaos theory.
Lindley (The End of Physics, 1993) has several goals: to honor Boltzmann, to emphasize that 20th- and 21st-century physics owe debts to the so-called era of classical physics (c. 1850–1900), and to solidify the argument that theoretical physicists are not simply quark-gazers—they open new ways for experimental physicists to think about matter and energy (as well as time and the Big Bang). Boltzmann, born in 1844 to a middle-class family in the Vienna of imperial Austria, entered the University of Vienna in 1867 with no notable signs of scientific genius. But he was quickly attracted to the ideas about atoms that were then swirling among a few scientists in Austria and elsewhere. Boltzmann developed a theory about the behavior of atoms: using statistical methods that included reckoning probability, Boltzmann offered mathematical evidence that the behavior of invisible, but numerous, beads of matter (atoms) were responsible for, for instance, how gas responded to temperature and pressure. Lindley brings in scientists from around the world to defend and challenge Boltzmann’s theories in detail. Austrian scientists in particular confronted him on his theory of atoms: If you can’t see it, does it really exist? Nevertheless, Boltzmann established an international reputation, with support from Emperor Franz-Josef. Despite what most would call a successful career—he was in demand from prestigious universities—the pressure of scientific and academic politics got to Boltzmann, and he eventually committed suicide, even as successors Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and others were acknowledging their debt to him. Lindley devotes a chapter to connecting the dots of 19th- and 20th-century physics with a history of atomic theory that dates back to the 4th century in Greece.
Physicists will be bolstered by Lindley’s bottom line: Like Boltzmann, theorizing is okay. Science buffs may need to have references at hand, however, to refresh their memories on the principles of thermodynamics and kinetic energy.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85186-5
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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