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Schwartz tries to justify Fermi about something I can not agree with him totally Readers maybe find what I mean after reading the book Fermi did not like media and media did not like him due to their stereotype yellow articles with those exaggerated and false titles which try to attract people to sell That s why many people do not know many big names even much bigger than Fermi in Science It was and is media unfortunately 9780465072927 Schwartz read a lot about Fermi before he realized that there was no definitive biography on the man After reading countless books and papers written about Fermi by his friends.
The man who knew everything deborah levy
I could read about Fermi over and over and never get tired of it The Pope of Physics by Gino Segre ended up being one of my favorite books of all time because it went into the physics a lot while at the same time simplifying a lot of the concepts If you are less interested in the science I would recommend this book If you want a in depth but basic explanation of the science that Fermi contributed to society I would suggest Segre s book 9780465072927 Here are my thoughts from the Literary Review In spite of its title this is not another book about Thomas Young the subject of Andrew Robinson s The Last Man Who Knew Everything 2006 If anyone deserves that description it is indeed Young a linguist classical scholar translator of the Rosetta Stone medical doctor and pioneering scientist at a time when scientists were very much generalists The subject of David Schwartz s book Enrico Fermi 1901 54 might accurately be described as the last man who knew nearly everything about physics but that wouldn t make such a catchy title. The man who knew everything book Fermi s name tends to crop up these days in connection with the Fermi paradox his suggestion that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe we ought to have been visited by now This argument is forceful than ever nowadays in the light of the recent discovery of planets than you can shake a stick at but it gets disappointingly little attention from Schwartz To historians Fermi is better known as a pioneering nuclear physicist responsible for the construction of the first controllable nuclear reactor called an atomic pile at the time and for his contribution to the Manhattan Project All this gets disappointingly too much attention from Schwartz who goes into tedious detail His background is in political science and it shows. The Last Man Who Knew Everything ebooks free One reason for this is spelled out in the author s preface There are no personal diaries to draw on and few personal letters in the archives One searches in vain for anything intimate Schwartz says So the biographer has to fall back on discussing the physics Unfortunately although his father was a Nobel Prize winning physicist Schwartz is in his own words not a physicist. The last man who knew everything reading The worst of several infelicities occurs when Schwartz is describing Fermi s most important contribution to theoretical nuclear physics the suggestion that there is a force of nature now known as the weak interaction that is involved in the process of radioactive decay He tells us that it gets its name because it takes effect only when particles come into extremely close range of each other This is nonsense Its weakness has nothing to do with its range Indeed another short range force known as the strong interaction is the strongest of all the forces of nature and the weakest force gravity has the longest range. Athanasius kircher the last man who knew everything Fermi was also one of the discoverers or inventors of Fermi Dirac statistics which describe the behaviour of such particles as electrons protons and neutrons collectively known as fermions Unusually for his time he was a first class experimenter as well as a first class theorist This was probably a factor in his early death In the 1930s Fermi briefly headed a world leading group of nuclear physicists in Rome before political events led it to break up In one series of experiments target materials had to be bombarded with neutrons to make them radioactive then carried down a corridor for their radioactivity to be measured by apparatus kept in an area separate from the neutron source Running down this corridor clutching the samples to his body Fermi was repeatedly exposed to radiation In 1954 at the age of fifty three he died of a heart attack his body ravaged by cancer. The last man who knew everything book pdf By 1938 Fermi whose wife was Jewish knew that it was time to leave Italy and move to America Before departing however he received a unique enquiry He was asked whether he would be able to accept the Nobel Prize in Physics if it were offered to him Schwartz is on much surer ground in explaining the intriguing background to this approach the only example of a recipient being approached in advance by the Nobel Committee The Swedish Academy was concerned that were Fermi to be awarded the prize Mussolini might follow the lead of Hitler who had been angry when Carl von Ossietzky received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 for revealing German rearmament the previous year and forbade any German from accepting an award from the Nobel Committee There was also the question of how Italian currency restrictions might affect the prize money Nevertheless Fermi accepted the accolade Following the ceremony in Stockholm the Fermis went on to America with their prize money equivalent to than 500000 today which certainly eased the transition And there he was roped into developing nuclear weapons technology in spite of being after December 1941 an enemy alien. The man who knew everything deborah levy It was in the context of his work on the first atomic pile that Fermi famously remarked to a colleague that he could calculate almost anything to an accuracy of ten per cent in less than a day but to improve the accuracy by a factor of three might take him six months He applied a similar approach in his private life where he enjoyed doing odd jobs and was happy as long as the end products worked however they appeared Never make something accurate than absolutely necessary he once told his daughter. The man who knew everything deborah levy This tiny glimpse into his mind exacerbates the frustration caused by the lack of insights of this kind Schwartz has probably done as good a job as possible with the available material about one of the most important scientists of the 20th century But it is a pity he did not have the draft read by a physicist who might have picked up the howlers A special place in hell should though be reserved for the publicist who tells us that the book lays bare the colourful life and personality of Fermi The author is at pains to point out that this is not the case so clearly the publicist has not read even the preface The Last Man Who Knew Everything is well worth reading but not if you are looking for colour and personality 9780465072927 I learned a lot I didnt know about this amazing scientist who died in his early 50s but influenced so mn any including my other physics hero Dick Feynman 9780465072927 An interesting biography of the last man who excelled at both theoretical and applied experimental physics The physics content in the book can be a little daunting I took notes and made numerous digressions in an attempt to better understand such terms as neutrionos beta decay and quantum theory but these are all still a bit fuzzy and would probably require a lot work on my part to really understand One bit of knowledge I did walk away with is that nuclear physics is really about probabilities When I studied Newtonian physics in high school eons ago I liked the absoluteness of the relationships we learned about such as F M x A At the nuclear level things are messier. The Last Man Who Knew Everything booking The biggest takeaway for me however was a sense of Enrico Fermi s humanity On at least two occasions documented in this book a younger colleague invited Fermi to be a co author on a paper because the colleague felt that the work could not have advanced without the discussions they d had with Fermi But Fermi politely declined saying that if his name appeared as a co author people would assume he was primarily responsible for the findings He didn t want to overshadow his young colleagues or stymie their professional progress I found this to be very generous and humane It was clear that Fermi took great joy in teaching and was good at it something that doesn t always go hand in hand with being a great researcher All in all an enlightening and satisfying read 9780465072927 One of Enrico Fermi s colleagues once referred to the eminent nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner by using the words of the book s title Fermi grew up in Rome in the early 1900s and showed brilliance as a child prodigy Just prior to the start of WWII he escaped Italy s Mussolini with his family for America and soon found himself working on the Manhattan Project He played a key role in the development of the atomic bomb which hastened the end of the war in 1945 He was also a brilliant teacher and nurtured the scientific education of his younger associates many of whom would go on to win Nobel Prizes themselves Author David Schwartz s father was also a Nobel Prize winner a coincidence which surely helped him write this book There are many references to scientific subjects including atomic fission Schrodinger Waves the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Fermi Dirac statistics Don t let all these items deter you from reading this book you don t have to have a degree in physics because the author makes sure that he gives you a basic understanding and relevance to the point he s making 9780465072927
| The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age By David N. Schwartz |
| 0465072925 |
| 9780465072927 |
| English |
| 448 |
| Hardcover |
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