Quantum Profiles

This book is not about quantum physics, but about some of the principals that made it what it is. Specifically, there are lengthy biographies of John Stewart Bell and John Wheeler. The emphasis is on what they did in physics, so there is very little mention of other details, such as what they did in their youth. There is also a short summary of the life of Michele Angelo Besso. While Bell and Wheeler are known for their work in physics, Besso is primarily known for having carried on an extensive written correspondence with Albert Einstein. For fifty-two years, the two men exchanged letters, and they provide a great deal of insight into the character and thoughts of Einstein. Fortunately, Besso was a talented physicist, so the subject matter is often the examination of questions in physics. Given the number of years that Bell and Wheeler have been involved in advanced physics, other physicists are also mentioned. Interactions with people such as Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feymann, Kurt Godel, Freeman Dyson, Neils Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm are all described. The amount of space devoted to the technical aspects of physics is almost nonexistent, the emphasis is on the people, their personalities and how they interacted. The paragraph that I found most memorable involved the spy Klaus Fuchs. Sir Rudolf Peierls, the man responsible for getting Fuchs involved in the atomic bomb project, heard that he had been imprisoned for spying and went to visit him. He told Fuchs, "There has been a terrible mistake. We've got to get proper legal counsel for you. Fuchs replied, "No, there is no mistake, I am a spy." Peierls responded, "How could you?" Fuchs answered, "Well, I meant to give control of the world to the Russians." Peierls responded, "But how could you?" To which Fuchs answered, "But then I meant to tell them what was wrong with them." Amazing, Fuchs was a genius as a physicist and about as naïve as a person could be when it comes to politics. The great catcher Roy Campenella once said about baseball, "You have to be a man to play this game, but you also have to have a lot of little boy in you." That seems to also apply to physics, as the overriding theme of the book is that a physicist must be smart, but also possess an overpowering childlike curiosity.

Very good, educative book. The first chapter introduces John Bell, whose discoveries in the foundations of quantum mechanics led this area of studies to a respectable, experiment-based level, with the famous Bell inequalities. He was a very good "traditional physicist" too, from the design of accelerators to anomalies in quantum field theory. He classified himself as a "quantum engineer". Sometime ago I read with great pleasure and profit the book with the correspondence of Einstein and Besso. Besso was a friend of Einstein's from Berne, at the Patent Service. An engineer, he had enough knowledge to follow (and contribute, according to Einstein) to the development of Relativity Theory. Bernstein tells the story of this cultivated gentleman in his last chapter. It was time . Besso is the only person cited in the great classic of our century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", where Einstein introduced relativity.

Beautiful book. It enriched my collection of little educative stories. The chapter on John Bell, a reference name in quantum mechanics, should be read by all students of science: how he, who was a particle physicist and "quantum engineer", defied the authority of no less than John Von Neumann and constructed what Von Neumann had "proved" impossible. Wonderful the story about Besso, and the explanation to her daughter, by Einstein, of why such a talented man, the only reference in the famous paper which introduced relativity theory, never published a paper. Very god indeed.