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"Bernstein, Jeremy, 1929- author"
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Quantum leaps : how quantum mechanics took over science
\"In the early years of its conception, J Robert Oppenheimer spoke of quantum theory as a subject that was \"unlikely to be known to any poet or historian.\" Yet, as Bernstein notes, in just sixty-odd years, one can find at least nine million entries on Google under the rubric \"quantum theory\" -- from poets and historians, as well as film critics and Buddhist monks. How did quantum mechanics enter general culture so pervasively? Having lived with the subject for most of its history, Jeremy Bernstein returns in this second edition to regale readers with a witty insider's perspective on the development of quantum theory as well as its loopholes. It is also a scintillating account of the interplay between brilliance and fallibility in humankind, even in the key figures who have shaped common understanding of quantum theory -- such eminent figures include Niels Bohr, the Dalai Lama, Tom Stoppard, and most notably, John Bell who made pioneering contributions in quantum physics as an underappreciated physicist. At once thought-provoking and intellectual, this semi-autobiographical popular science book is highly recommended for readers with rudimentary knowledge of science history, philosophy, and naturally, physics\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A bouquet of Dyson : and other reflections on science and scientists
\"My friendship with Freeman Dyson goes back over a half century. My first contact with him goes back to the late 1950s, when I was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and then evolved when I was a consultant at General Atomics in La Jolla, California. Freeman was then trying to design a space ship -- the Orion -- which would be propelled by atomic bombs. When I left the Institute, Freeman and I continued our correspondence and I saved his letters. They are written in an almost calligraphically elegant handwriting. It is hard to see how you could make a mistake in a mathematical computation if you wrote that clearly. The letters show his human side and his enormous range of knowledge. There are then two essays involving the physicist Fritz Houtermans who was an extraordinarily colorful character. There is a brief essay on Einstein's collaboration with a fraud. There is even an essay on the Titius-Bode law and the new exo-planets. Because of my enduring interest in nuclear weapons, the reader will find essays devoted to that. There is also a bit of fiction at the end\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Quantum Profiles
For the prominent science writer Jeremy Bernstein, the profile is the most congenial way of communicating science. Here, in what he labels a \"series of conversations carried on in the reader's behalf and my own,\" he evokes the tremendous intellectual excitement of the world of modern physics, especially the quantum revolution. Drawing on his well-known talent for explaining the most complex scientific ideas for the layperson, Bernstein gives us a lively sense of what the issues of quantum mechanics are and of various ways in which individual physicists approached them.
The author begins this series of interconnected profiles by describing the life and work of John Stewart Bell, the brilliant physicist employed at the gigantic elementary particle laboratory near Geneva (CERN), whose \"Bell's Inequality\" inspired a generation of researchers to confront, by experiment, just how peculiar and counterintuitional quantum mechanics really is. Bernstein then discusses the career of the prodigiously active and creative John Archibald Wheeler, who worked in the beginning stages of almost every branch of contemporary physics and invented the terms \"black hole,\" \"ergo-sphere,\" \"geon,\" \"Planck length,\" and \"stellarator.\" The book closes with a moving commentary on the correspondence, of fifty-two years duration, between Einstein and the gentle, talented, but little-known Swiss engineer Michele Angelo Besso. \"Of all the Einstein letters I have read these are surely the most striking, on a purely human level,\" writes Bernstein of the Einstein-Besso correspondence. \"Einstein was not given to close friendships--`the merely personal,' as he once put it--but these letters are filled with `the merely personal,' even though the deep issues of physics and its philosophy are never very far away.\"
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