The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein

After reading Mr.Thompkins in Wonderland in my tender youth, far back, this was the most enlightening introduction to Physics and physicists I ever came across with. Gamow was a fantastic story teller, imaginative but precise. His hand drawn illustrations, that greatly enrich the two books, are both naive and powerful. The same with the lively personal stories and anedoctes involving the great physicists of all times, including many of the first half of the past century, many of whom he knew personaly, on friendly terms. He was also one of them, on scientific stature. I often come back to Gamow, to refresh some of my memories, as if I had the privilege of possessing an immortal grandfather.

Gamow has long be revered as one of the original science "popularizers"--mostly because of his lucid and well trimmed writing style. This book is no different and it has the added bonus that Gamow actually knew most of the modern physicists--starting with Einstein--personally. It is worth buying for the great "kayak problem" in the relativity chapter alone, but has a wide range of different interesting tidbits, biographical information, and of course physics in Gamow's distinctive way. Well worth a read, especially for only $10.

This book contained everything you could wish to know concerning just about every physicist that has had a major scientific contribution. This is a great book for intermediate scientific readers. I also liked that it had diagrams especially drawn by the author himself.

We are in 1959, Gamow is introducing us to some of the greatest REBELS civilization managed to build and deploy. Let us look again at the title: from Galileo (1564-1642) to Einstein (1879-1955). This is a vast range of ingenuity and competence challenging the state-of-the-art by thinking about nature freely. But this book starts with the inquisition making Galileo confirm that our planet does not move and it is the center of the universe. From there, this book becomes a thrilling adventure unveiling nature. The team includes Kepler, Fraunhofer, Faraday, Hertz, Maxwell, Lorentz, Michelson-Morley, Bohr, Heisenberg, Plank, ... and Dirac. Gamow is great knitting great people together. And his goal is to motivate YOU to join them.

We live in the early stages of the big bang of scientific knowledge, and this book is an account of that big bang itself. Now, many people can tell stories, but rare is the combination of a master storyteller with a world-class physicist. Gamow is such a rarity. Known sometimes as the ordinary genius (see book: Ordinary Geniuses) he interacted with the extraordinary geniuses of his time, but more importantly he had the intellectual capacity to understand those extraordinary geniuses whose stories he tells in this book.

I haven't read the entire book yet. But just in selecting a few pages, I've already detected simple errors that should not occur. Fig. I-1 is clearly in error and when I have the time I'll sort it out completely. And on page 139, the equation for the "resistance of wire" is wrong. The resistance of a wire is proportional to the length of the wire and inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area. I'll sort this out later to find out what is really meant. This is distressing since I've glanced at only a few pages yet already found two errors. I hope to do better as I read the entire text.

Awesome history of physics along with the actual subject matter. I love George Gamow and his writing style. He brings new insight to the subject even if you already know your physics.

I purchased this book because I was required to for a class. If you are interested in physics and want to know more about the history of its development, you will enjoy this book.