Archimedes to Hawking review

Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them by Clifford Pickover (Author). Archimedes to Hawking takes the reader on a journey across the centuries because it explores the eponymous physical legal guidelines--from Archimedes' Legislation of Buoyancy and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Hubble's Regulation of Cosmic Growth--whose ramifications have profoundly altered our everyday lives and our understanding of the universe. Throughout this fascinating book, Clifford Pickover invitations us to share within the wonderful adventures of good, quirky, and passionate folks after whom these laws are named. 

These lawgivers turn out to be an enchanting, various, and typically eccentric group of people. Many have been extremely versatile polymaths--human dynamos with a seemingly infinite supply of curiosity and power and who labored in many different areas in science. Others had non-conventional educations and displayed their unusual abilities from an early age. Some experienced resistance to their ideas, inflicting vital private anguish. Pickover examines more than 40 great laws, offering brief and cogent introductions to the science behind the laws in addition to participating biographies of such scientists as Newton, Faraday, Ohm, Curie, and Planck. Throughout, he includes fascinating, little-known tidbits regarding the law or lawgiver, and he gives cross-references to different laws or equations talked about in the book. For several entries, he contains simple numerical examples and solved issues in order that readers can have an arm-on understanding of the applying of the law. 

A sweeping survey of scientific discovery as well as an intriguing portrait gallery of a few of the greatest minds in the historical past, this very good volume will engage everybody concerned with science and the physical world or within the dazzling creativity of those brilliant thinkers.

Science is commonly erroneously, I think, seen as "chilly and austere like sculpture" as Bertrand Russell as soon as described the field of mathematics. But, the story advised by Pickover of a few of the great legal guidelines of science and the lawgivers who gave us these legal guidelines is much totally different from that. It is a story of unimaginable human passion, of individuals like Michael Faraday who described electrical energy as "the soul of the universe", the modestly educated Pierre Curie who gained a Nobel Prize in physics, and Robert Hooke who invented the hygrometer to measure humidity after observing that the hairs of the beard of a goat would bend when moist and straighten out when dry. Different figures endured weird afflictions, unusual non secular beliefs, harsh criticism from rivals, and even simultaneous discoveries of their own work by others. Yet, they triumphed and continued in what Murray Gell-Mann described as "the most persistent and best adventure in the human historical past, this search to know the universe."

Pickover describes the laws, the lawgivers, and the character of scientific legal guidelines in a brisk and energetic tempo, and peppers the book with a great deal of shade and black and white illustrations. And, since you will doubtlessly wish to study more, there's a generous supply of references, both in print and on the internet. Science is uninteresting and dry - nah, do not imagine it. It is lively and human drama when Pickover tells the story! 

Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them 

 Clifford Pickover (Author)

528 pages

Oxford University Press, USA (April 16, 2008)

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