San Antonio College Library

Traces the history of the atom through detailed biographies of its famous and lesser-known proponets.

Abraham Pais's life of Albert Einstein was one of the finest scientific biographies ever written. When it first appeared in 1982, Christian Science Monitor called it "an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man," and Timothy Ferris, in The New York Times Book Review, said it was "the biography of Einstein he himself would have liked best," adding that "it is a work against which future scientific biographies will be measured." As a respected...

Almost weightless and able to pass through the densest materials with ease, neutrinos seem to defy the laws of nature. But these mysterious particles may hold the key to our deepest questions about the universe, says physicist Heinrich Päs. In "The Perfect Wave" he serves as our fluent, deeply knowledgeable guide to a particle world that tests the boundaries of space, time, and human knowledge.

"Nobel laureate and scientific luminary Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was a pioneering nuclear physicist whose contributions to the field were numerous, profound, and lasting. Best known for his involvement with the Manhattan Project and his work at Los Alamos that led to the first self-sustained nuclear reaction and ultimately to the production of electric power and plutonium for atomic weapons, Fermi and his legacy continue to color the character of...

This accessibly written history takes the lab from its emergence out of the Manhattan Project and the University of Chicago "Met Labs" to the present. The book traces Argonne's constant concern with reactors, basic research, and its relationship with the midwestern science community and equally constant search for identity and mission as public and political priorities shifted.

"Lise Meitner was the first woman to earn a Ph. D. in physics at the University of Vienna, a pioneer in the research of radioactive processes and, together with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, an interpreter of the process of nuclear fission in 1938. She was a colleague and friend of many of the giants of 20th century physics: Max Planck, her Berlin mentor; Albert Einstein; Max von Laue; and Niels Bohr, to mention only a few. Yet at the end of World...