The Strangest Man

Download or read book The Strangest Man written by Graham Farmelo and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

Download or read book The Strange Man written by Greg Mitchell and published by Charisma Media. This book was released on 2011 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-two and unemployed, Dras Weldon is content to hide in the shadow of adolescence with his horror movies and comic books. But when a demonic stranger begins threatening his friends, Dras must choose to act or lose his best friend forever.

Download or read book It Must be Beautiful written by Graham Farmelo and published by Granta Books (Uk). This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning and unique look at the great equations that lie at the heart of many of the most successful scientific theories.

Download or read book Churchill's Bomb written by Graham Farmelo and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II. As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the Bomb's strategic implications. This was odd -- he prided himself on recognizing the military potential of new science and, in the 1920s and 1930s, had repeatedly pointed out that nuclear weapons would likely be developed soon. In developing the Bomb, however, he marginalized some of his country's most brilliant scientists, choosing to rely mainly on the counsel of his friend Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford physicist with often wayward judgment. Churchill also failed to capitalize on Franklin Roosevelt's generous offer to work jointly on the Bomb, and ultimately ceded Britain's initiative to the Americans, whose successful development and deployment of the Bomb placed the United States in a position of supreme power at the dawn of the nuclear age. After the war, President Truman and his administration refused to acknowledge a secret cooperation agreement forged by Churchill and Roosevelt and froze Britain out of nuclear development, leaving Britain to make its own way. Dismayed, Churchill worked to restore the relationship. Churchill came to be terrified by the possibility of thermonuclear war, and emerged as a pioneer of detente in the early stages of the Cold War. Contrasting Churchill's often inattentive leadership with Franklin Roosevelt's decisiveness, Churchill's Bomb reveals the secret history of the weapon that transformed modern geopolitics.

Download or read book A Curious Man written by Neal Thompson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most successful entertainment figures of his time, Robert Ripley’s life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Bucktoothed and hampered by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation of the weird and wonderful. He sold his first cartoon to LIFE magazine at eighteen, but it was his wildly popular ‘Believe It or Not!’ radio shows that won him international fame, and spurred him on to search the globe’s farthest corners for bizarre facts, human curiosities and shocking phenomena. Ripley delighted in making preposterous declarations that somehow turned out to be true – such as that Charles Lindburgh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was not the USA’s national anthem. And he demanded respect for those who were labelled ‘eccentrics’ or ‘freaks’ – whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 2,871 alphabet letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose. By the 1930s, Ripley possessed a wide fortune, a private yacht and a huge mansion stocked with such oddities as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices. His pioneering firsts in print, radio and television tapped into something deep in the American consciousness – a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, wackiest and weirdest – and ensured a worldwide legacy that continues today. This compelling biography portrays a man who was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual – but who may have been the most amazing oddity of all.

Download or read book Strange Beauty written by George Johnson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

Download or read book The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories written by Miles John Breuer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathered here for the first time are Miles J. Breuer s first publication, The Man with the Strange Head ; his neglected dystopian novel Paradise and Iron (appearing here in book form for the first time); stories such as Gostak and the Doshes and Mechanocracy ; and Breuer s essay The Future of Scientifiction, one of the early critical statements of the genre. Also included are some of the author s letters from the Discussions column of Amazing Stories. Much of what we know as science fiction saw the light and found its themes, styles, and modes in the science fiction magazines of the early twentieth century. It was in these magazines of the 1920s and 1930s that Breuer often led the way. Breuer himself found his inspiration in the work of H. G. Wells and in turn influenced science fiction masters from Jack Williamson to Robert A. Heinlein. The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories collects the best work of this pioneer of the genre.