1 comments about Elements of Modern X-ray Physics.

1. Before this book came out, the bible of the scientists in the field was either Guinier's or else, Warren's book on X-ray diffraction (both books by Dover). I think Jens Als-Nielsen's book will replace these as far as introduction to the field is concerned, because the other two books (especially warren's black book) are pages of equation after equation. Elements of Modern X-ray Physics, in contrast, is much more readable (it has colors even... wohooo). Also it covers recent techniques suxh as scattering from liquid interfaces that were not covered in previous books. Trade-off is that the book does not cover any crystallography. Author's say in the preface that they feel there are other adequate books on this subject (guinier's book prevails).

   Interesting note: Book is written not with conventional text editors but with some type of Tex/LaTex.

5 comments about Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness.

1. While this book does make some interesting points about chaos, I found that the book's blatant disregard for accepted science very hard to stomach. I currently attend Harvey Mudd College, a small, but highly regarded science and engineering school, so I like to think that I know something about the subject.

   For example, at one point the authors are describing solitons (a term I had never heard before), states a theory that by generating an extra bit of energy we could put the universe out of the unstable equilibrium it currently exists in and cause it to "begin to boil." While this is all well and good, it makes vast assumptions that the authors neglect to mention. Most importantly it assumes that the universe is in an unstable equilibrium, a fact which although highly unlikely is not impossible. Secondly it assumes that the universe is completely clean of these bits of extra energy currently. They draw this parallel to an example of superheating water because without external particles to build upon no bubbles can form to release the steam. This is also true, but it is still impossible because it is impossible to have a perfect system like this. There are always going to be minute cracks in the pot, or imperfections in the water (fractal theory, covered earlier in the book, even states this!), and so while this might be theoretically possible it will not happen in any real world environment. The book has many other places like this where the authors conveniently leave out details that might weaken their arguments. I find this to make the book as a whole very frustrating to read, even if some of their points are valid.

   Another reason that I find the book to be very frustrating is that everything is very sensationalized. At the beginning of the description of fractals the authors say that the first person to think of a fractal curve created "a panic among mathematicians that took some fifty years to resolve." I find it truly hard to believe that the entire mathematical community was pulling their collective hair for fifty years trying to explain this curve, but by phrasing it this way the authors make it seem like science as a whole does not want to accept new ideas because it would make them look bad. In reality though I think the scientific community is ready to accept anything that can be strongly proven theoretically, or experimentally (just look at relativity, or quantum).

   Because of all of these failings I would not recommend this book. I am sure that there are many other better books about chaos theory that do an excellent job of describing it without disregarding the rest of science, or trying to place it in places where it does not necessarily belong.




2. I've finished this book's Chinese version today. In the last year, I'm trying my best effort to absorb knowledge of Chaos Theory, Complexity, and Catastrophe Theory. It's quite hard to get a in-depth guild of the above knowledge to common people in Hong Kong.

   My purpose to get the above knowledge is just in order to find the hidden order of financial market, and, of course, to make profit from the market. That's why I find this book is good to serve my purpose. It explained clearly on fractals, the relationship between chaos and order, and non-linearness.

   I knew E. Peters has using fratals / Elloit Wave Theory to analyze financial market. Of course, it needs more intra-day data to try to find such fratals in a small scale period, e.g. in a 5-minute charts. But I guess that, such fractal are existing in the market, if you watching index movement everyday.

   On another aspest, the technique of plotting data in a phase space is a tool to get the picture of financial market to me. This tools can be compared with weighted moving average, MACD, or other technical indicators. Though, phase space analysis is quite uneasy to a man without advanced mathematics. I'm quite sure such mathematical technique may apply to financial trading.

   Besides, the idea of "quasi-periodic" is likely describing financial market. Though I got less knowledge from the book on this topic. It sounds like some ideas from William Gann, and other cyclist writings.

   Hince, I'm benefitted from the book to enlighten new view point to see the world, and the market. I recommend any financial market practitioner to read this Chaos Theory guild and then reread some technical analysis classics, and reviewing their trading strategies. I believe that shall be worthy in one's trading life.

   N.B. The picture 2.7 is missing (P.76), and there is some printing errors in its Chinese version which printed in 20.6.1997




3. A wonderful synthesis of science at the edge. A grasp of how scientific methodology is changing to accommodate the revelations of chaos theory. The used edition I read was from 1990 and is prescient even now (alas). The informed and illuminating evidence that revolutionizes the current Neo-Darwinistic paradigm of molecular evolutionary theory towards the end of the book was particularly refreshing. John Briggs and F. Peat's thinking is so strikingly lucid, informed, and visionary that this book will fail to make almost any lecture list where it is most needed for years to come.



4. Here is an easy to read exposition of the theory of order out of chaos and how the natural world arises from basic natural processes repeated over and over again. The relevance of fractals to this study is given as well as a description of psychic processes. A must read for anyone interested in the new science. All the more complex theories of interest to the magical endeavor are based on the ideas presented in this book. It's an excellent companion to James Gleick's "Chaos."



5. This book is hard to find, contains a bit too much math (you can kind-of skip it if it overwelms you), it is out of print, hard to find and exagerates a bit some times but, if you read through it your perspective on life, causality and human behaviour will change and you will have a better understanding of un-undestandable things.

5 comments about The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom.

1. I enjoyed this book very much and finished it in two days (it's quite rare for me to do this as I'm not a fast reader). I felt as though I was watching over the shoulders of Cockcroft and Walton as they built the first accelerator while working at the Cavendish under Rutherford. I think that Brian Cathcart is an excellent author and I hope that he decides to write a few more books about the history of science. This is definitely one of my favorites in this category. I think modern day experimental physicists must look at this period in the development of their subject with longing. Cockcroft and Walton built their own accelerator on a minimal budget. Nowadays it takes billions of dollars and the cooperation of hundreds of people and organizations from many countries to build a new accelerator. All that a current physicist can hope for is his/her slice of time to run some experiments.



2. Thumbs up for Brian Cathcart. Well done. What a good find and thank you University of Chicago Bookstore!
   
   Though it would greatly help to grasp the significance of the events described in the book if the reader had a scientific background, it is a great read regardless. Even more remarkable is the fact that the author does not claim any formal technical training or background. It took me one weekend to go cover to cover.
   
   Basically the scientific research in the glorious Cavendish Labs during 20s and early 30s is described, work which led to the complete understanding of the classic picture of the atom. It was a time when British science was at its peak. Incredible amount of detail of the personal lives of the scientists and their apparatus, construction and engineering methods, the social and moral norms that guided the group and society at the time have been presented. The research is impeccable.
   
   Reader gets a chance to peer over the shoulders of the scientists, one can almost hear the pumps rattling, corona crackling and scintillation counters glowing in the poorly lit labs. Engineering detail is superb.
   
   This was also the time of international brotherhood in physics. They were one big family, ignorant of politics and other boundries. An innocence lost with the WWII.
   
   Some of the personalities lived on till 80s. What an adventure! Starting in strictly Victorian era settings, discovering electron and other subatomic particles and then they got to witness the comupter and information age.



3. In my school days, I had come across the names of Rutherford, J.J.Thomson and Chadwick but not the two protagonists of this book - John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. Cockcroft and Walton were the first physicists who successfully 'split' or disintegrated the nucleus.
   
   What is interesting about this book is that it manages to provide us with a feel of the excitement and challenges experienced by physicists at the Cavendish Lab during the 1920s-1930s. Most general history of physics tend to focus on ideas and theories but not the nitty gritty aspects of building apparatus and conducting experiments. Instead of taking the former route, this book emphasizes on the importance of empirical physics and its interactions with theoretical physics. At the center of this story is how Cockcroft and Walton raced to build a particle accelerator that is used to bombard the Nucleas.
   
   But machines are not the central element of the book. The author devotes a great deal of space to building a human aspect of the story. Aside from Cockcroft and Walton, we are are fed with vignettes of Rutherford (who provided crucial leadership at Cavendish) as well as others like Chadwick, Gamow, and the Bohr brothers.
   
   A particularly interesting aspect of the book is the competition between the different groups of scientists in different countries (UK, USA, France) working on the same problem. This is more intense given the winner-take-all nature of breakthrough discoveries in term of academic (and public) fame.
   
   This book should be of great interest to readers who enjoy reading about the general history of physics. Lack of knowledge or memory of physics would not be an obstacle to the enjoyment of this very readable book. Highly recommended.



4. Noticing that I make an occasional foray into popular science writing, a physicist friend of mine thrust this book on me, claiming I wouldn't be able to put it down.
   
   Not the case. Although for him the book was supremely interesting and matchlessly well-wrought, I found it a passable but unexceptional bit of science narrative.
   
   The subject matter concerns the efforts and discoveries of a pioneering group of atomic physicists working at Cambridge in the 1920's.
   
   Although certainly not technical, the material, I feel, requires a fairly solid grounding in elementary physics and chemistry to follow the "action," not to mention appreciate the magnitude of the breakthroughs the author recounts.
   
   The author assures us he has taken pains to insure this is not the case, but I differ.



5. "The Fly in the Cathedral" by Brian Cathcart is one of the best science books I have ever read. This wonderful book provides a rich historical perspective into some true giants of science and their contemporaneous endeavors that provided the scientific community with the first roadmaps of the atom.
   
   The book is revisits the dynamic activity at the Cavendish Labs in Cambridge as Cockcroft and Walton doggedly pursue the splitting of the atom. The story captures the spirit of the times - the competition, the cooperation, and the friendships. These assiduous men and women were pioneers in a new frontier of science. In doing so, they were also laying the foundation of scientific professionalism.
   
   I savored each passage as these resourceful scientists ingeniously persevered in unraveling the mysteries of atomic physics. Rather than deify them, these Nobel laureates and collaborators were humanized - which made their aspirations, struggles and contributions all the more inspiring. I felt privileged to be part of their history. We can only thank Cathcart for his roadmap to that place and time.

1 comments about Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms.

1. What a delight to see this book in print again-especially at such a resonable price.
   This book is the classic exposition on atoms-both theory and practice as of 1977 (my
   review is actually from my 1957 copy). Do not be mislead by the seeming restriction
   to 1 and 2 electron atoms. The work applies to atoms of any number of electrons. While
   it will be missing modern work done on relativistic and correlation effects in atoms
   (much of which was done after 1977),and modern experimental techniques(lasers,cooling
   of atoms,etc),the serious student or researcher in atomic physics must have knowledge
   and command of this material. The writing style is very clear and very careful,and
   even the footnotes are a delight (and also relevant today).

No comments about Modern Quantum Field Theory: A Concise Introduction.

1 comments about Quantum Liquids: Bose Condensation and Cooper Pairing in Condensed-Matter Systems (Oxford Graduate Texts).

1. It is a truely collection of insightful ideas. What is the BEC in real strognly correlated system? Most of books in this field just tell us the name of "order parameter" and "off-diagonal long-range order" but no further explanation and cites Penrose and Onsager's 1956 paper. That's all. But, here, this book explains THE IDEA what the physicist want. What is BEC, why does it occur, and how can we define it in general system?
   
   As the title of book shows, Leggett explains superfluid and superconductor in the integrated point of view. Like the BEC chapter, he doesn't avoid the key ideas even if they are quite complicated in other's book. Moreover, Leggett give us very sharp and critical arguments about many things which are usually treated as typical or trivial in other's famous book.
   
   One of the advantage of this book is difficulty. Most of readable books in this field are too out-of-date and old. Modern books are usually based on field theoretic formula and have tones of diagrams. But this book balances phenomenological, microscopic explanation, more over, experimental data and published in 2006. (It contains some arguments about rescent discovery such as supersolid and BEC-BCS crossover.)
   
   In addition, the author is Nobel prize winner in 2003 about his ground-breaking papers about 3He. Hence this book not just a good book but also authoritive book. Highly recommended.

1 comments about Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices, and Prospects.

1. I am amazed that nobody wrote yet a review of this book.
   
   I liked this book a lot. David Bodansky's style is logical, concise and fun to read. What I liked most is that the author succeeds to attack with equal clarity a wide range of diverse subjects about nuclear energy:
   - Economic considerations on nuclear energy.
   - The physics principles behind nuclear reactions, and their relevance in reactor design, etc.
   - Engineering considerations around nuclear reactor design and operations
   - Administrative considerations around waste disposal.
   
   To conclude: if you have some background in physics, math and/or economy, and you need a no-nonsense introduction in the field of nuclear energy, then this book is for you. However, if you just like to read prose, (and you don't enjoy technical details being sprinkled during the exposition) then the book migth be too high-level.

5 comments about Atomic Physics (8th Edition) (Dover Books on Physics and Chemistry).

1. Max Born was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, a great physicist and a cultivated gentleman. His "Atomic Physics" has been around since a long time, but is still the best place to find out why do we really need to replace Newtonian mechanics. This book studies every kind of phenomena which puzzled the physicsts of the early century, like thermal equilibrium of radiation, photo-electric effect, the Bohr model of the atom, specific-heat irregularities, cohesion forces among molecules, etc. Then he shows how quantum mechanics correctly describes each one of them. This is done in a pedagogically very effective way: the ideas are explained in the text, while the more formal derivations appear in a large set of appendices. These are gems of precision and concision, precious by themselves. My favorite one is the derivation of the Van der Waals forces (between molecules), which he shows to be essentially quantal, as they are due to the zero-point energy of the ! quantum harmonic oscillator. One of the great text-books of this century.



2. When we see how much quantum mechanics pushed our civilization and how bad it became explained on 'modern' textbooks it is a relief to find out that this book is still published and affordable. A must for anyone interested in the subject or needing to understand it with the help of one of the fathers of QM.



3. Well, this is probably not the most up to date text but it is still one of the best. The book is a collection of topics (Atomic Physics, Solid State Physics, some of QM, some of classical Physics, Statistical Thermodynamics), which are explained in a short, simple and clear way. This is also a great book for those who are familiar with QM: they will find an excellent collection of topics that are just outlined on other standard QM textbooks. Moreover one can learn a lot from the original way M. Born approaches important subjects in Physics (how to recognize the Physics in every concept, for example). This is a book everyone interested in Physics should have in her/his library.



4. Atomic Physics is based upon a series of lectures on physics that Born gave in Germany in 1933. Since then it has been translated into English updated significantly as physics developed. This means that the book represents sound physics, and not the relatively undeveloped 1933 picture of the physics.
   
   I should note that the title of the book is slightly misleading. The original German edition was called modern physics. However, the publisher of the English version already had a book called modern physics, so the English version was renamed Atomic Physics.
   
   Born covers a wide range of topics dealing with the gasses, elementary particles, the structure of the nucleus, atoms, molecules. He has written the book in the context of describing the historical development of each topic. This is done in a flowing style by only including important equations in the text. Derivations and so fourth are placed in the 130 pages of appendices in the back of the book. This allows the text to tell a story without the burden of constant discontinuities due to equations. If you want to see the maths, just flip to the back of the book.
   
   I would classify this book somewhere between popular science and a textbook. Like a popular science it tells a story, it flows and readable. People with some knowledge of physics can read this book and learn a lot form it. Even without the appendices. On the other hand, like a text it doesn't give hand wavy, simplified descriptions of the physics. This is good hard physics.
   
   While I wouldn't call this book a text, it is far too general for that, it does give an excellent overview of the development and character of modern physics from one of the people who was there in the thick of it. I highly recommend it to any person that is acquainted with physics. Non-scientists would probably benefit more from reading something like Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.
   
   This is a great book, it is well written, structure and relevant. It fully deserves five stars. To reiterate what other reviewers have said, I wish present-day textbooks were written this well.



5. I used this book many years ago to prepare for my preliminary exams (pre-PhD exams) in modern physics. Although it's dated (ca. 1950), that doesn't matter very much. The strong feature is that it discusses the content without getting into a lot of formalism, and gives the historical connection between different aspects that one is not likely to see in the usual text books.

5 comments about Physical Foundations of Cosmology.

1. Theories are written to explain observed phenomenon. They are then used to predict future discoveries. So long as the theory continues to work, it is accepted by the scientific community at large. Up until thirty or so years ago the model of the Cosmos was a fairly well agreed upon theory. Then slight problems began to appear, until in 1980-81 the author of this book conducted some experiments and developed theories that applied quantum fluctuations to the large scale structure of the universe.
   
   This began the theory of inflationary cosmology that remedied several annoying little problems in the standard big bang model of the universe.
   
   This is a textbook suitable for students in theoretical cosmology, physics, and astrophysics. It might be suitable for advanced undergraduates, but is more likely to be used in graduate level study. Some knowledge of general relativity and particle physics (and quantum field theory) is said by the author to be helpful but not necessary. I suppose that that's true, but by the end of the book you will certainly have some knowledge in this area. I'd recommend a bit of study in other books before tackling this one.
   
   This book is a good single volume work on the modern view of cosmology. It can be used as a text on the subject. Further it contains a lot of information that will be very useful for even the best experts in the field.



2. I think this is the best conceptual book in cosmology,
   I truly enjoy reading it.



3. With the rising importance of cosmology has come an increasing flood of textbooks on modern cosmology. While I have not surveyed all the textbooks out there, many of those I have looked at suffered from serious problems. Recently, I had the opportunity of looking at Slava Mukhanov's new book on cosmology and I was so struck by its excellence that I am moved to post a review on Amazon, something I am not in the habit of doing. The bottom line is that I heartily recommend to any student or physicist serious about mastering modern cosmology. Mukhanov is one of the earliest pioneers in inflationary cosmology and a towering figure over the whole field, particularly when it comes to actual calculation, as compared to mere talk, of the density fluctuation spectrum.
   
   Different people have different criteria for an outstanding textbook. I like a textbook to slice away all the obscure and unnecessary formalism shrouding the subject and to get through to the underlying concepts and the important physical ideas. So, dear reader, if you love heavy dry formalism that does not help you understand physics, then this book is not for you. (An aside: from a cursory glance at some of the reviews of physics books posted on Amazon I was amazed by the number of readers, apparently misinformed and misguided, more interested in mathematics and formalism than in understanding physics.)
   
   There is a whole spectrum of books on cosmology. There are the giant compendia of every imaginable topic, but with almost nothing really derived, such as the book by Peacock. Then there are those books notorious for the amount of hype and hot air they blow. Such books apparently really appeal to people who want to "grasp" cosmology without doing any work; they could just read the hype and "be happy." On the opposite end of the spectrum is the book by Scott Dodelson, which is full of nitty gritty, the real stuff that you need to do detailed cosmic microwave background calculations, and which for that reason I highly recommend to students wanting to become professional cosmologists.
   
   I have not read Mukhanov's book in its entirety. I read the parts on inflation and looked at his treatment of density perturbations. I really like his discussion of inflation, which carries the stamp of authority and deep understanding associated with a master who invented the subject. He cuts to the essential physics of the different approaches and wisely refrains from presenting the one thousand and one inflationary scenarios that have flooded (some would say, polluted) the literature. When he comes to density perturbations, he does it as simply as possible, and most importantly, correctly. Students should be aware of the fact that many of the well-known papers on the subject contain errors, as Mukhanov points out in a very helpful and biting footnote.
   
   I recommend this book enthusiastically to all those serious about modern cosmology.



4. I've read the book and solved part of the problems in the course of a few months.
   
   Let's start with the good. Viatcheslav Mukhanov is obviously an expert in theoretical cosmology, he is well known for quantizing the cosmological inhomogeneities. On 400 pages, he discusses all major topics like the necessary general relativity, hot universe (nucleosynthesis and recombination), the speculative ideas about the very early universe, inflation, inhomogeneities (their quantization and subsequent evolution), primordial quantum fluctuations, CMB, the gravitational wave background, and the CMB polarization. He is apparently a wizzard in obtaining semi-analytical approximations of differential equation solutions where others use numerical code. Experts in the field will appreciate the book as a primer for formulas and approximations. It feels like the author has shown his own view in the derivations, and often generalizes them compared to more elementary texts - for example the general relativity chapter is not limited to flat universes only and the inflation chapter discusses a rolling de Sitter space (H varies with time) not the easier exact de Sitter. The emphasis is on deriving approximate formulas in gory detail and interpretation of the results.
   
   Now the bad for which I deducted one point. This books is definitely not for undegraduate or even middle level graduate student despite the author's claims. Understanding the GR chapter requires a course in GR and understanding the early universe chapter with its speculative fantasies coming from particle physics require a REALLY GOOD understanding of the ideas at frontiers of QFT - I had hard time telling what was going on conceptually behind the messy formulas.
   
   The price to be paid for encompassing more general cases and deriving messy approximations is that there is no space left to carefully familiarize a beginner reader with the concepts - just mentioning something true is not enough to understand it deeply. Some of the high level explanations Mukhanov offers obviously assume an expert level reader. To a middle level reader like me, those explanations sound a little cryptic although I have no doubt they are true. What's the point though if the non-specialist will often go like 'huh ... what .... from where?'. I've written many of those in the book margins.
   
   I found the author's claim that the text is easy to follow as algebra and manipulations completely NOT true - he often skips big chunks of algebra offering incomplete explanations how the next formula was derived. It takes huge amount of time to fill in the missing details, often requiring guessing the author's mind and on a few occasions I was simply unable to get it. I've written something like 100 pages just filling details.
   
   I have been able to solve maybe 30% of the problems interspersed in the text. Many of them lack sufficient support in the text and there are no solutions or answers. It would be more pedagogical in my opinion to have at least solution outlines - what's the merit of a problem most readers won't be able to solve? Some of the problems require knowing approximation techniques like WKB, stationary phase, asymptotic series. Mukhanov could have written an appendix on these since he uses them so often.
   
   After reading the book, I became familiar with the messy algebra at the frontier of cosmology. I've experienced lots of new concepts (not too deeply though) and seen powerfull approximations. The general logical picture of cosmology that I have hoped to gather from this book still remains a little chaotic - not sure what derives from where.
   
   The book shoud be usefull for specialists looking for more generalized formulas and approximations. Mukhanov should work on more carefull explanation of concepts and the algebra if he wants that to be a book for beginners or middle level students. I suggest Scott Dodelson for that.
   
   Recently I've found out that the Mukhanov textbook is almost a 1-to-1 copy of some of his overview articles [...]. Detail omission is common in published articles for the purposes of brevity but such style is not appropriate for a textbook.



5. I was really thinking of buying this book. But since it didn't have the
   "search inside" feature, the decision is on hold.

5 comments about Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists.

1. While an easy to read book, Jungk presents some false information that depreciates the value of the book.

   The first is the impression that Von Weisacker and other German scientists attempted to give to the post war world, that they were not really trying to build a bomb, but were merely interested in nuclear power. This is refuted by Jeremy Bernstein, in his book "Hitler's Uranium Club." The historical record shows that there were many memorandums sent to the German Military, by the scientists, about the possibility of producing an atomic bomb.

   The more serious misstatement however, is about Klaus Fuchs' espionage on the Manhattan Project which was the most damaging espionage committed by any of the atomic spies of that era. Jungk claims that Fuchs decided to spy for the Soviet Union when he learned about plans to bomb Hiroshima. This is so off base that one has to question Jungk's scholarship or motives. Here is why: Fuchs began spying for the Soviets in 1941 in Britain, before Pearl Harbor and before there was even a Manhattan Project. The decision to acutally bomb Hiroshima was made in 1945. None of the scientists know what the targets were.

   This is such a huge distortion of the facts that it should be mentioned in any review of this book. The book has lots of details but if you buy it, beware of some of the downright distortions of history. A better choice is Richard Rhodes's book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb".




2. This book was written nearly 50 years ago in the 1950's, so naturally some of the stories are incomplete with todays hindsight, but I wish I'd read this book 20 years ago. It is extremely well written, and full of fascinating anecdotes. Although I am familiar with many of the characters & stories, there was something new for me in every chapter, for example the insights into Oppenheimer in Germany before WWII. It would be wonderful if a revised version could be published incorporating the story of the Soviet Atom Scientists.



3. This a clear and terrible book. It can be considered as one of the most complete compelling and passionate works about the most chilling decision in the mankind story . the moral and politic story of the atomic scientists or the underground account of what happened among stage sceneries while the atomic finding and the construction of the atomic weapons . An impressing gallery where you will finf the famous and glorious names osuch as Niels Bohr , Oppenheimer , Heisenberg , Rutherford, Enrico Fermi , Szilard , Dirac , Joliot Curie , Kapitza , Otto Hahn , Weizacker their political approach , from Hitler to Roosvelt and Truman .
   Jungk presnts us the collective drama of the atomic energy and the responsibility of the scientists who wishing or not they finally finished accepting the tragicg fate and the ethical dilemma .
   The fir4st part is an account which reveals how gradually at early 1939 , many of them were frightened about the final consequences of their discovery , but in the other hand the suspect the german scientists could be capable of making the expected weapon under Hitler service .
   Then the author explores the work of the German scientists around the atom fission , the intensive and unfinished stages work in U.K. and U.SA. under the Oppenheimer control, Los Alamos review and the famous July 16 , the countless Szilard and Frank efforts for preventing and avoid the use of the Atomic Bomb over Japan absolutely useless as all we know .
   This book shows us how the science has created its own world having lost of any moral force to oppose the development of the most destructive weapons .
   The moral crossroad of a notable group of men who escaping from a demolisher oppressive nazi regime fell under a new form of destructor power of its own individuality , freedom and conscience
   To have an absolute domain of that complex web I recommend to acquire The great decision whose author is Michael Amrine..
   A must for any kind of reader , no matter your job is .



4. Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns encompasses one of the most recent subjects in Physics, Atomic Energy. He begins by describing the Environment the most prominent physicists were educated in, Gottingen University in Germany, although an insight into the lives of these emerging physicists was well depicted, I felt that it was little too much background information and not enough explanations of the developments these budding physicists generated. The pattern of excessive background information seems to continue throughout the book, but there is much valuable information to be had throughout the book. The book covers everything from the plethora of atomic physicists sprouting after the First World War to the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s trial that removed him from his lofty position at the head of America’s Atomic Energy Commission. This book presents good information, but it is not very accessible as it was written by a German Physicist and later translated into English, and an immense interest in the topic is required to appreciate it.



5. Recently, in theatres in London and New York, the public was treated to the drama "Copenhagen," by British playwright Michael Frayn, and it revisited the theme of this now old book. The play was about a visit in September 1941 by the then young German physicist Werner Heisenberg to his mentor and dear friend Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark. So a detail in a bigger picture, but still a key detail!
   
   The wider subject of Robert Jungk's book is a biographical sketch of the pioneers in nuclear physics, the individual scientist who built the atomic bomb (the time before Hiroshima and Nagasaki), or whose theories were instrumental. The debate about the history, the science, and its implications of the nuclear bomb started after World War II, and it is important to remember that nuclear scientists worked on both sides of this conflicts. Now with hindsight, the Cold War, and nuclear proliferation have taken centre stage, but back in 1956 when Robert Jungk's book first appeared, World War II was still casting a big shadow on events and on the debate about nuclear deterrence. In my opinion Robert Jungk's book was one of the first serious attempts at a general account on what was clearly a watershed in history, a series of events that are shaping our lives even today. Since 1956, Robert Jungk's book was reprinted many times, and many more related books appeared.
   
   Jungk's book is interesting in that it paints a vivid portrait of such scientists as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and other leading physicists at the time, and on both sides of that conflict.
   
   What is interesting now is to view Robert Jungk's book in the light of Michael Frayn's play, and especially in light of newly released papers on the Niels Bohr archives in 2002, following the wide attention given to Michael Frayn's version of the 1941 meeting in Copenhagen. The 2002 addition to Niels Bohr's archives is a deposit comprising documents either dictated or written by Niels Bohr referring to what was said at the fateful 1941 meeting.
   
   Michael Frayn's play makes it clear that the two Bohr and Heisenberg were very close both scientifically and personally, and that the 1941 meeting changed all of that. Both men were devastated!
   
   Heisenberg was a leading scientific advisor to the German government in post WWII Europe; and yet he spent the rest of his life attempting to put his spin on his war work; his work on a nuclear bomb for Hitler, or perhaps rather denying these efforts. Niels Bohr who died in 1962 had been extraordinarily tight lipped about his meeting with Heisenberg in 1941. So while the newly released letters supplement and confirm previously published statements of Bohr's recollections of the meeting, especially those of his son, Aage Bohr, this part of the story is not well known, and especially not to Robert Jungk. The letters are from Niels Bohr to Heisenberg, and they are interesting for many reasons, not least of which is that they were never mailed, and so their contents were never known to Heisenbrg. Quoting from one of Bohr's letters to Heisenberg: "--- I think that I owe it to you to tell you that I am greatly amazed to see how much your memory has deceived you in your letter to the author [Robert Jungk] of the book ["Brighter than a thousand suns"],---." Review by Palle Jorgensen, July 2006.