tailieunhanh - Great Physicists

This book tells about lives in science, specifically the lives of thirty from the pantheon of physics. Some of the names are familiar (Newton, Einstein, Curie, Heisenberg, Bohr), while others may not be (Clausius, Gibbs, Meitner, Dirac, Chandrasekhar). All were, or are, extraordinary human beings, at least as fascinatingas their subjects. The short biographies in the book tell the stories of both the people and their physics. | Great Physicists The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking William H. Cropper UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001 UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kull I lanflil Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press Inc. Published by Oxford University Press Inc. 198 Madison Avenue New York New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cropper William H. Great Physicists the life and times of leading physicists from Guillen to Hawking William H. Cropper. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513748-5 1. Physicists Biography. I. Title. QC15 .C76 2001 530 .092 2 dc21 B 2001021611 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi I. Mechanics Historical Synopsis 3 1. How the Heavens Go 5 Galileo Galilei 2. A Man Obsessed 18 Isaac Newton II. Thermodynamics Historical Synopsis 41 3. A Tale of Two Revolutions 43 Sadi Carnot 4. On the Dark Side 51 Robert Mayer 5. A Holy Undertaking 59 James Joule 6. Unities and a Unifier 71 Hermann Helmholtz 7. The Scientist as Virtuoso 78 William Thomson 8. The Road to Entropy 93 Rudolf Clausius 9. The Greatest Simplicity 106 Willard Gibbs 10. The Last Law 124 Walther Nernst III. Electromagnetism Historical Synopsis 135 11. A Force of Nature 137 Michael .