Looking for a type of book

[suffian]

I'm coming towards the close of a good (yet dated) book: Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell. For those of you who haven't read it, the book gives a detailed accounts of the lives up the many recent greatest mathematicians and also touches upon the work they did.

Is there a book that would be akin to Bell's but for physics instead? A "Men of Physics" per se that discusses the lives of men like Einstein, Bohr, Thompson, etc.

[Integral]

Give Schrodinger's Cat
by John Gribin a try. While it is not specifically a biography of Physicists it is a very good history of the development of modern physics and who did what.

[DR OF DEATH]

i have got to agree, that is probably the best book about the history of physics ive read.
(dont understand the relevence of the title though)[;)]

[Tyger]

by William H. Cropper. Has many good technical explanations in it.

[NEOclassic]

Originally posted by suffian
I'm coming towards the close of a good (yet dated) book: Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell. For those of you who haven't read it, the book gives a detailed accounts of the lives up the many recent greatest mathematicians and also touches upon the work they did.

Is there a book that would be akin to Bell's but for physics instead? A "Men of Physics" per se that discusses the lives of men like Einstein, Bohr, Thompson, etc.

Hi suffian,
You would be highly pleased with the strongly biographical nearly 3000 page treatment (three volumes) by Jefferson Hane Weaver and titled: "THE WORLD OF PHYSICS" subtitled "A Small Library of the Literature of Physics from Antiquity to the Present". Look for it at your public, school,or College Library. I found my set of these tomes on ebay for 30 or so bucks; they were beautifully new except for quite slight high-lighting. I consider this set more valuable to me than my 3 volume set of Feynman's notes. Cheers, Jim

[suffian]

Thx! I checked out amazon and these all look like great books, I can't wait to dive in.

[Tom Mattson]

There's a book about Feynman called Genius. I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about it.

[brum]

I'm in the middle of "On the Shoulders of Giants" right now.

Subtitle: "The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy" "Edited, with commentary, by Stephen Hawking)

Features the major works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.


It's worth checking out at your local library.