Book Description
Niel Bohr's life spans times of revolutionary change, in science and in its impact on society.Along with Einstein, Bohr can be considered as this century's major driving force behind the new mathematical and philosophical descriptions of the atom, the nucleus, and all that resulted from them. Now available in paperback for the first time, Abraham Pais, the acclaimed biographer of Einstein, traces Bohr's progress from his well-to-do origins in late nineteenth-century Denmark to his central position in the world political scene, particularly because of the development of nuclear weapons during the Second World War.Pais describes the state of physics before Bohr and considers his legacy, both theoretical and practical.But more than this, he captures the essence of Bohr, the intensely private family man who, despite appalling personal tragedy, became one of the best-loved cultural figures of recent times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Niels
Online Review
This book is set up perfectly.It includes chapters that are not about Niels Bohr, but on other scientists of the time, which helps understand more in depth of Bohr's studies.It is a very easy book to read where each chapter is broken up into subchapters that makes it even easier to read.Although it was a fairly straight forward book, it got very boring at times.This book may get very confusing at times because it does not only talk about Bohr, but also talks in depth of many other scientists that also worked with quantum physics.
Abraham Pais did a great job of portraying Niels Bohr not only as a great scientist, but also as a great man.He goes about to explain in depth Bohr's family, how many scientists influenced his work, and the kinds of experiments and studies that he did.By reading this book, we can tell that Abraham Pais has a science background as well because of his ability to explain the experiments of Bohr and other scientists in great detail.With his background, Pais was able to write a book that glorified not on Niels Bohr, but also the entirety of physics.

INSPIRING: It's a small world after all
Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr, NIELS BOHR'S TIMES, IN PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITY, isn't really about rock 'n' roll, and you can't find anything about Aimee Mann in the index, but anyone who has a sense of the multiplicity rampant in modernity ought to want to sit these people down for a good listen to the `It's Not Safe' song at the end of the `I'm with Stupid' (1995) CD by Aimee Mann.The CD liner notes has the words of the songs in alphabetical order, but Aimee Mann is loved as a songwriter well enough to have the lyrics and chords posted on the internet, with six chords for the first line, making it easy to verify that one of the three words between from and fun on the alphabetical list is used to describe the kind of "freak in this world in which everybody's willing to choose swine over pearls":

And maybe everything is all for nothing
Still you'd better keep it to yourself
'Cause God knows it's not safe with anybody else.

Those political planners who expected World War II to make the world into a safer place might not be ready to accept that `small' would be the idea most closely associated with any country which was conquered by Germany, and Denmark was occupied by the Germans in 1940.Just a few months after the war ended in 1945, "In a lecture to the Danish Engineering Society Bohr said that plutonium can be produced at the rate of 1 kilogram per day, causing allegations that he was giving away atomic secrets.This led him to send a clarification to the press stating that he did not know technical details about the production of active materials."(p. 511).Chapter 21, Bohr, pioneer of `glasnost,' shows the interaction of a scientist who wanted information to be shared openly with a political system that functioned on secret circus stunt principles.Only those with a need to know how the new stunt would be performed would ever be given enough information to use; small nations were expected to be purely spectators.

There are a few elements of philosophy in this book, most generally considered in Chapter 19, `We are suspended in language.'Small atoms hydrogen and helium played a large part in developing the old quantum theory in 1913-1916.Bohr was recognized early in his career, receiving the Nobel Prize for physics on November 9, 1922, when Albert Einstein was given the prize for 1921 a year late.(p. 211).Einstein is the heading for a column of topics in the subject index, and Chapter 11, Bohr and Einstein, reveals, "Music was a profound necessity in Einstein's life, not in Bohr's."(p. 225).

The second verse of `It's Not Safe' is a fair description of the themes of a biography:

You can take your own advice and try again
But a thousand compromises don't add up to a win
And they'd be happy if you'd only cover your tracks
But the trail of crumbs you've left won't help you find your way back

Physicists might talk about particles, but on a very small scale, things that are too tiny to see might be something else entirely, energy in the form of a wave, a matrix of mathematical values, or as ephemeral as the probability of a particle being at a particular place and time.Bohr won attention early in his career by being able to correlate the spectral lines for light given off by hydrogen (with four frequencies measured in 1859 and 1860, p. 141) with the energy levels of the single electron in the hydrogen atom.Bohr learned the Balmer formula for calculating the frequencies in February, 1913, and Bohr wrote a paper by March 6, 1913 which he sent to Rutherford for publication.There are calculations on pages 147-148 for energy states, the orbital angular momentum on page 150, magnetic moment on page 151, and "The insistence on the role of the outermost ring of electrons as the seat of most chemical properties of the elements, in particular their valencies, constitutes the first step toward quantum chemistry."(p. 152).In 1915, Bohr proved that ultraviolet light emitted by mercury vapor when the energy of an electron exceeded 4.9 eV gave "the first direct experimental proof of the Bohr relation!"(p. 184).

The idea of quantum mechanical probability was introduced by a paper by Max Born on June 25, 1926.(p. 286).Science may become more like opinion polling in the future, but Niels Bohr clung to the idea that physics still needed to be about measuring quantities which could be related to the laws of classical physics.Students attempting to confront new problems they faced in breaking atoms down into smaller particles came up with probability distributions of the electron in hydrogen like Fig. 9 on page 307, except that a footnote explains, "the size of the atom for n = 10 is actually about 100 times larger than for n = 1."All the extra space required for high energy levels only gets measured in secondary effects."Heisenberg remembered how `Bohr emphasized the complementarity between temperature and energy to the extreme'."(p. 437).What we see is ordinary properties, but Bohr had to account for such by tracing the "matter back to the behaviour of assemblies of immense numbers of atoms."(p. 437).Maybe modern political thinking, as reflected in the ability to devise opinion polls which tell politicians whatever they want to hear, is closer to this notion of complementarity of diverse elements than our typically academic study of the classical political thinking of Plato about the good, or of Machiavelli's writings about the powerful direction of mass thinking by some all-conquering big lie.But Aimee Mann can sing like hell:

You can play along, but you'll just end up wrong somehow, won't you?

Elementary
This man nos nuttiing bout scince i tink he shdntld rlease ne mre boks in da futr

Captivating!
Captivating biography! One of the best. In a class by itself!
Written before the popular Broadway play, "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn, Pais' book covers the Heisenberg-Bohr meeting in 1941[the real one],--- and there is a lot more! We are fortunate that Pais has given us this, and several other wonderful biographies;-- the one about Albert Einstein stands out! It is especially fortunate that he has chosen to write for the general public. I can't think of anyone who did, or possibly could have done it better. His writing is captivating, and unique in its recreation of the times, and the social context of the scientific events. Pais further succeeds magnificently in bringing to life the many colorful personalities. This includes the young physicists born in Europe around 1900 who arrived in Copenhagen in the 1920ties to work with Bohr, some later to win the Nobel Prize,-- how he became a father figure to some of them,- Heisenberg, for example. And there are the other players,

Albert Einstein early on, and Pais himself later, in the drama of quantum physics of the Twentieth Century. Even if you might perhaps not be scientifically inclined, and if you choose to skip the physics sections, I don't think you will be disappointed.

QM a la Bohr
Historical description of the development of nuclear and quantum physics, especially from the viewpoint of Bohr and colleagues, many who Pais worked with. Provides a non-technical description of many of the principles of modern physics. ... Read more

Book Description
Quantum theory, the most successful physical theory of all time, provoked intense debate between the twentieth century's two greatest physicists, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Quantum information theory has emerged from intensive study of the structure and interpretation of quantum theory to become one of the fastest growing areas of twenty-first century science. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated to cover recent developments, including the findings of papers published since the well-received first edition. A substantial new chapter is devoted to the development and structure of quantum information theory. Developments in the experimental and theoretical study of Bell's Theorem are also covered in detail, and the accounts of ongoing work have been brought up to date. A fascinating account of the development of quantum theory, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the fundamental questions of physics, its philosophy and its history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Excellent overview
For students of physics, professional physicists and interested lay persons this is undoubtedly the most complete and objective overview of the many 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics as of today.For those interested in looking "behind the mathematical formalism of QM" an absolute must read.

One minor point of critique though: this book explicitly addresses lay persons (which is supposedly why you won't find many equations in the book). Although in chapters 2 - 4 prof Whitaker splendidly epitomizes the evolution of classical (with a glance at relativity) and quantum mechanics, I fear those readers not already familiar with physics may find this a little too terse (a lot of ground is covered in very few pages). Chapters 5 - 7 explaining the Bohr-Einstein debate and Bell's theorem are simply splendid reading for everyone. Chapter 8, rounding up recent developments, is very comprehensive, but again, the average lay person may find the summaries of quite a number of recent articles a bit tedious in the end (but ideal for students or physicists). Chapter 9 introduces quantum information theory, again a very good overview, but in my opinion a bit out of place and surely a subject that is worthy of a book on its own.

All in all, there are many good popular science books out there explaining one or two QM interpretations, but this one covers them all, and it's absolutely the best explaining the Bohr-Einstein debate and the impact of Bell's theorem on this debate.

Superb history and introduction
This is not a textbook; it is a combined history and introduction to modern physics. It is clear, well written and a good starting point for anyone interested in Relativity or Quantum Theory.

A truly excellent book
I have found this to be an extremely helpful book due to my interests in physics.It is an interesting philosophical taint on a subject matter which is mostly fought in obscure mathematics.I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in quantum physics philosophies.

Dillema is spelt "dilemma"
This book is an excellent introduction, summary of and history of the debate on interpretation of quantum theory, a subject which demands careful reading. As such, it may be read to profit by those interested in some ofthe twists and turns of "received opinion". It is not for thosewho might like their pages covered in equations (- the text discusses J SBell's elucidation of Von Neumann's errors on the subject of hiddenvariable theories- a clear case where the mathematics concealed ratherthan revealed). The book is widely referenced which should have enoughrange of material to satisfy and extend readers at all levels. In my topten on the subject area.

Dillema is spelt "dilemma"
This book is an excellent introduction, summary of and history of the debate on interpretation of quantum theory, a subject which demands careful reading. As such, it may be read to profit by those interested in some ofthe twists and turns of "received opinion". It is not for thosewho might like their pages covered in equations (- the text discusses J SBell's elucidation of Von Neumann's errors on the subject of hiddenvariable theories- a clear case where the mathematics concealed ratherthan revealed). The book is widely referenced which should have enoughrange of material to satisfy and extend readers at all levels. In my topten on the subject area. ... Read more

Book Description
Einstein looked up to him, the Nazis tried to abduct him, his institute in Copenhagen hosted just about every Nobel prize winner in physics you can name (and then some), and Winston Churchill considered him a dangerous, dangerous man. His friends and enemies agreed: Niels Bohr was more than the father of quantum mechanics - he was one of the most important figures of the 20th century. The Tony Award-winning Broadway play "Copenhagen" barely scratched the surface... Suspended in Language tells the complete story of Niels Bohr's amazing life, discoveries, and his pervasive influence on science, philosophy, and politics. Told in an engaging and accessible mixture of text and comics, it includes a full color supplement on how to teleport just like the pros do-and why you might not want to! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Great Comic
This is really a good example of tough physics made accessible! I enjoyed reading the book and will definitely recommend it to students and colleagues.

"We don't disagree as much as you think"
To his colleagues, Niels Bohr was the "Pope of Physics." Razor-edged minds like Dirac, Franck, Frisch, Gamow, Klein, Mott, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Planck, Schrödinger, and others -- many of whom would later become Nobel laureates themselves -- to proud to say they had studied with Bohr. He was a poor lecturer because he never knew where his thoughts would take him and would often stop in the middle of an explanation when a new idea occurred to him. Without him, there would be no modern physics, no quantum mechanics, no basic understanding of the atom. And while Bohr sometimes entertained theories that turned out to be wrong -- which he was the first to admit -- even Einstein was wrong in areas where Bohr was right. Ottaviani is a very uneven graphics chronicler of modern science and scientists, but this is a very well thought out book, as successful an attempt as I have seen to explain Bohr's thought (as well as his humane and internationalist personal beliefs) and the basics concepts of quantum physics.

Bohr and
Ottaviani's Suspended in Language operates on a number of different levels and is appealing with just the right mixture of intellect and humor. While managing to create a biographical text on the life of Niels Bohr the story also delves into the fundamental principlesof quantum mechanics. Ottaviani created a piece that could be solely read as a primer on quantum mechanics while managing to focus on Bohr's life. The facts are elucidated in illustrations that are intentionally reminiscent of a comic-strip. Just when you begin to feel like you're cramming a bit too much information into your brain all at once the book will take a several page detour into the every day dealings of Bohr's life, and having given you the chance to collect your wits, rev back up to an intellectual furor. What truly makes the book remarkable though is the concise yet vivid description of the various other physicists that Bohr interacted with and influenced. Ottaviani obviously felt compelled to tell the story of Bohr's life because he impacted so many different areas of science and revolutionized fields whose true merit has yet to be realized. Everyone should read this book in order to have a basic understanding of how the scientific notions that guide our lives today were first conceived of and then put into widespread implementation. It's a great read and an even better learning experience.

Bohr Isn't Boring!
Science teachers have a large number of stories - some true, some apocryphal, and some somewhere in between - to regale their students with.We have Einstein's demands of the deity concerning dice, Rutherford's booming voice that trashed lab apparatus, Oppenheimer's Indian verse quoting at Trinity, and Teller's strangelovian life among others, but no good stories from the life of Niels Bohr.Jim Ottaviani, Leland Purvis, et al. have saved us with their intelligent, witty, and spacey cartoon retelling of Niles Bohr's life - Suspended In Language.

If you choose to dip into this very cool science biography, prepare to learn some physics along with the story of Bohr's life.The authors have supplied a generous number of footnotes and endnotes [done as cartoons] to explain the harder points.The book is indexed and referenced to the extreme.This is not some casual cartoon compilation, but a serious piece of graphic scholarship.

I highly recommend Suspended In Language to anyone interested in physics, scientists, or the history of the 20th Century.I also recommend the other books about scientists from G.T. Labs, including Safecracker [Richard Feynman] and Fallout [Oppenheimer, Szilard, and the Bomb].
... Read more

Book Description
Murdoch describes the historical background of the physics from which Bohr's ideas grew; he traces the origins of his idea of complementarity and discusses its meaning and significance.Special emphasis is placed on the contrasting views of Einstein, and the great debate between Bohr and Einstein is thoroughly examined. Bohr's philosophy is revealed as being much more subtle, and more interesting than is generally acknowledged. ... Read more

Book Description
Hardbound. ... Read more

Book Description
Since the Niels Bohr centenary of 1985 there has been anastonishing international surge of scholarly analyses of Bohr'sphilosophy. Now for the first time in Niels Bohr and ContemporaryPhilosophy Jan Faye and Henry Folse have brought together sixteenof today's leading authors who have helped mould this new round ofdiscussions on Bohr's philosophy. In fifteen entirely new, previouslyunpublished essays we discover a surprising variety of the differentfacets of Bohr as the natural philosopher whose `framework ofcomplementarity' shaped the final phase of the quantum revolution andinfluenced two generations of the century's leading physicists. Thereis much on which the authors included here agree; but there are alsopolar disagreements, which assure us that the philosophical questionsrevolving around Bohr's `new viewpoint' will continue to be a subjectof scholarly interest and discussion for years to come.This collection will interest all serious students of history andphilosophy of science, and foundations of physics. ... Read more

Book Description
This is a detailed study of Niels Bohr's work on an epistemological foundation for twentieth century physics.The connections he drew between physics, language, and philosophy, are traced historically and their validity is analyzed in the light of contemporary science. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume is an important study for understanding the complex interconnections between basic science and its sources of economic support in the period between the two world wars.The focus of the study is on the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later renamed the Niels Bohr Institute) at Copenhagen University, and the role of its director, the eminent Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, in the funding and administration of the Institute.Under Bohr's direction, the Copenhagen Institute was a central workplace in the development and the formulation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and later became an important center for nuclear research in the 1930s. Dr. Aaserud brings together the scholarhip on the internal origins and development of nuclear physics in the 1930s with descriptions of the concurrent changes in private support for international basic science, particularly as represented by Rockefeller Foundation philanthropy.In the process, the book places the emergence of nuclear physics in a larger historical context. This book will appeal to historians of science, physicists, and advanced students in these areas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

skilled director and fund raiser
There have been several well regarded biographies of Niels Bohr. But Aaserud takes us on a more focused tour. He looks at Bohr's role as director of Copenhagen's Institute of Theoretical Physics, in the 1930s. The intent is to study Bohr's ability as a director, in keeping a nuclear physics research group funded, year after year.

Before the Second World War, this was a far trickier proposition. Then, nuclear physics was seen as pure science; decoupled from the real world. (An attitude that would radically change after the war.) So we see Bohr in a different light. He had clear talents in being able to wheedle funds out of wealthy benefactors. Of course, having the prestige of a Nobel clearly helped!

The book also has an extended discussion of the pre-war refugee problem. Mostly Jews who were denied positions in Nazi Germany, and who sought these at Bohr's institute. He made valiant and often successful attempts to get several of them jobs. But from the vantage point of today, with hindsight, one has to wonder if they should have looked further afield (like outside Europe). ... Read more

Book Description
This is an introduction to the ideas of randomness that are central to much of modern physics and have overthrown the "clock-work universe" conceptions of earlier centuries. The author shows how the laws of probability and statistics were developed by such mathematicians as Fermat, Pascal, and Gauss, and how they received their first major application in physics in the kinetic theory of gases developed by Maxwell and Boltzmann. Here the use of statistics is necessary because the number of particles involved is too great for a deterministic calculation. But soon the mathematician and physicist Poincare demonstrated the unpredictability if certain systems containing only a small number of bodies, because of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. He thus became a founder of chaos theory. Finally, with the advent of quantum theory, physics seemed to be based on an essential randomness, whose reality was debated by Bohr and Einstein till the end of their lives. Only recently, in the experiments of Alain Aspect, has a convincing demonstration been given the inescapable randomness of quantum theory is a fact of nature. Professor Ruhla guides the reader skilfully through all these developments and provides mathematical details in appendices. The book provides an accessible introduction to the modern physicist's conception of the world of cause and chance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Chances are, you'll like this book
If you ever read one book on quantum theory, then this is the book you should read.Especially if you want to understand Bell's Inequality and how the experiments done by Alain Aspect in the 1980's verified that the inequality is violated.

I first heard of Bell's inequality and the EPR Paradox while reading an article by David Mermin in "Science News" and did not understand it at all.Then I read Robert Adair's account of it in "The Great Design" (a good book to have) and I began to gain a rudimentary appreciation of what was going on.But it wasn't until I read Ruhla's "Physics of Chance" that I learned how to derive the predictions of quantum theory - the predictions which show that two distant objects can exert influence on one another, "faster than the speed of light."

But Bell's Inequality is not the only subject in here.The text begins with rather simple treatments of probability, applied to coin tosses and telephone queues, on to Boltzmann Statistics, and then finally to quantum theory.So as your reading through the chapters in the book, you pick up the "tools" you need as you go along, in order to understand the more difficult material later on.

Ruhla's writing style is engaging, although silly at times....

A wonderful overview of statistical physics
This book is extraordinarily well written and illustrated.It introduces the major themes of statistical physics at a level that shold be readily accessible to senior undergraduates or scientists and engineers who are non-specialists. Highly recommended; a gem! ... Read more

Book Description
Paperback. Of all the developments in twentieth century physics, none has given rise to more heated debates than the changes in our understanding of science precipitated by the ``quantum revolution''. In this revolution, Niels Bohr's dramatically non-classical theory of the atom proved to be the springboard from which the new atomic physics drew it's momentum. Furthermore, Bohr's contribution was crucial not only because his interpretation of quantum mechanics became the most widely accepted view but also because in his role as educator and spokesman for atomic physics Bohr was very much the patron spirit of the entire quantum revolution. The conceptual framework which he proposed to provide a new viewpoint for understanding the quantum theoretical description of atomic systems became for most of this century the dominant outlook of countless productive experimental and theoretical physicists. He called this new framework ``complementarity''. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
This new paperback edition celebrates the centennial of the birth of one of the major theoretical physicists of our time. It is an engrossing account of an exciting period in history and science as well as a good introduction to nuclear physics for the nonscientist.

Moving from Bohr's first great contribution - a description of what is essentially the modern picture of the atom, in 1913, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1922 - the book covers his creation of one of the most productive research institutes of the modern period. It also describes his less well known political work before and during World War II, when Bohr first helped colleagues escape from Italy and Germany, and then returned to Denmark to participate in the anti-Nazi movement; and at war's end, when he worked toward a vision of a world free from the dangers of nuclear war.

Ruth Moore is a science feature writer for the Chicago Sunday Times. She is the author of several popular science books, including Man, Time, and Fossils: The Story of Evolution and Charles Darwin: A Great Life in Brief. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Biography of Niels Bohr
This biography recalls the entire life of Niels Bohr, one of the preeminent scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the author even likens his influence to Aristotle's. Though focusing primarily on his scientific life, the book traces his life from his promising beginnings in Denmark until his death in 1962. Also included is the author's assertion that Bohr was nearly able to halt the nuclear Arms race that spawned the Cold War. Other notables that are mentioned in conjunction with Bohr include: James Franck, Lord Rutherford, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Sir John Cockcroft, Ernest Lawrence, and Adlai Stevenson. ... Read more