[PDF Download] The Merely Personal: Observations on Science and Scientists Full pages Books detail ●

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Title : [PDF Download] The Merely Personal: Observations on Science and Scientists Full pages isbn : 1566633443

Book synopsis Although he was trained and once worked in theoretical physics, Jeremy Bernstein is best known as a long-time science writer for The New Yorker magazine. The Merely Personal gathers several of his magazine pieces, many written in the last ten years. They address the origin and history of scientific concepts, probe into the deepest workings of game theory and chess machines, and raise big questions: If German scientists had succeeded in making a nuclear weapon, would they have turned it over to the Nazi government? Is reality knowable? Does God in fact play dice with the universe? The best parts of Bernstein's book, however, are those that look into the often strange lives of individual scientists, such as the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who was "a full-blown paranoiac" who used his isolation from the world to afford a new way of looking into logical systems, and the scientist Richard Feynman, whose "Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown." Bernstein's portraits of Einstein, Kepler, Oppenheimer, and other major scientific theoreticians and practitioners offer a bird's-eye view of how research is conducted and breakthroughs are made, all delivered in highly readable prose. --Gregory McNamee