Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Hydrogen : The Essential Element by John S. Rigden ISBN: 0-674-01252-6 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: reflects a turning point for physics
Comment: John Rigden has achieved a remarkable synthesis here in humanizing what is normally a coldly inhuman subject. I have always been interested in the mechanics of subatomic processes, but have found it difficult to understand when presented as an end-product of research efforts. This book contextualizes the research effort in such a way as to relate the research findings to the real life people who struggled to obtain them. In the process, I ended up learning the details of the nature of hydrogen much better than in any other book.
I think this kind of humanizing of physics is overdue and marks a welcome development for future efforts in physics writing. Physics is, in the end, a human endeavor and can only be understood in detail when presented as such.
As an example of the difference, I will quote from page 216 in reference to David Schramm-- "David was a first-rate scientist, 'but,' as Margaret Geller has written, 'perhaps more important in this harsh world, he was an extraordinary person of great generosity and kindness.'"
These words are apt for this effort by John Rigden... the book is a work of great generosity and kindness. I look forward to seeing this sentiment be taken up in future works in the field of physics.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting look at physics history
Comment: The author takes us on a history of 20th century physics by focusing on the signal element of Hydrogen. He does a good job of providing enough technical detail to make it clear why certain discoveries are important without overwhelming you. His choice of focusing on Hydrogen does limit him a little as to what he looks at though. A fairly short book so worth the investment in time for me.
Rating: 5
Summary: Simplicity to Demonstrate Complexity
Comment: It makes sense, if you are going to try to understand something, to go to the simplest instance of it and get all the information you can from the subject unimpeded by complications. Hydrogen is the simplest of all atoms. It is all around us; though hydrogen gas floats out of our atmosphere to join the hydrogen atoms that are in the "vacuum" of space, hydrogen makes up a large proportion of stars, water, and ourselves. John S. Rigden has written an admiring tribute to the simplest atom, _Hydrogen: The Essential Element_ (Harvard University Press). It turns out that hydrogen has played an enormous role in our understanding of matter and energy, and that the simplest of atoms is so complicated and surprising that Rigden's book is a continual source of elemental wonder.
Hydrogen is element number one, only a single electron orbiting a single proton. Repeatedly Rigden shows that this simplicity has been a boon to research. The lessons learned from this basic atom, in Rigden's story, form a history of physics in the twentieth century. The refinements to theory have largely been to explain the dark bands in the spectrum produce when hydrogen is made to glow. Niels Bohr produced the first modern picture of the atom, incorporating the experimental data from Rutherford and the hydrogen spectrum, but recklessly disregarding the historic laws of physics which he felt could not apply within the atom. He thus began the amazingly successful and fabulously strange quantum explanation for the behavior of matter. Rigden has not just included experimenters and theorizers, but also appealing stories about them, such as I. I. Rabi developing magnetic resonance in the 1930s to measure the nucleus, but then in 1988 being wheeled into a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine. He said, "It was eerie... I would never have dreamed that my work would come to this." _Hydrogen_ is not just about understanding the inner workings of the atom, but also about hydrogen as the ticker of a clock, as anti-matter, and as a confirmer of big bang cosmology.
There are plenty of challenging chapters here, meant for the non-scientist but not necessarily easy reading. Although the mathematics is not detailed, there are some equations shown that could be intimidating; Dirac's equation, predicting antiparticles and electron spin, Rigden assures us is a "little equation" that can be "written in one line," and while this is true, the line has twenty algebraic symbols in it. Also, surprisingly, there is little about the hydrogen bomb. Rigden decided that the bomb did not fit into the theme of how the hydrogen atom has led and will continue to lead to improved scientific knowledge. His charming and informative book shows how some mysteries have been solved but that we should never come to the conclusion that we are close to knowing all: "After all, H stands not only for hydrogen, but also for humility."
 |
Title: Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World by Nick Lane ISBN: 0198508034 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
 |
Title: It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science by Graham Farmelo ISBN: 1862074798 Publisher: Granta Books Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley ISBN: 0198503407 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny M, Ph.D Le Couteur, Jay Ph.D Burreson ISBN: 1585422207 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 24 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: The Constants of Nature : From Alpha to Omega--the Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe by JOHN BARROW ISBN: 0375422218 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
