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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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