Contributions by:

Colin Hughes

The End Of A Certain World: The Life And Science Of Max Born, by Nancy Thorndyke Greenspan

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In the 1950s I studied physics at Birkbeck College in London, first as an undergraduate and then as a postgraduate research student under the supervision of the Reader in Theoretical Physics, Dr Reinhold Fürth, an émigré from Continental Europe who had taken his doctor’s degree at the University of Prague. I mention this because from…

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Edward Teller: The Real Doctor Strangelove, By Peter Goodchild

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The Real Edward Teller? As someone who worked on the development of the first British atomic bomb, on early ideas for a thermonuclear weapon, and on nuclear reactors for research and power production from 1949 through 1964, I have always been gripped by stories of the early nuclear pioneers in the United States: Hans Bethe,…

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Mark Wolverton’s A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer

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(New York: Saint Martins Press) Over the last decade, at least nine books have appeared with the name ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’ in the title, and no doubt the trend will continue. Some are biographies, covering Oppenheimer’s life as family man, as physicist, as ‘father of the atomic bomb’, as victim of a witch hunt during…

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Lawrence M Krauss’, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, and Graham Farmelo’s, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius

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Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman were legends in their lifetimes and remain so to this day. Their peers thought of them as unconventional, eccentric, magical geniuses. As theoretical physicists, they had much in common – an ability to focus on difficult problems and pursue them, if necessary, for months on end. Their personalities were, however,…

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B. Jack Copeland, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford University Press, 2012)

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Alan Turing was an outstanding British mathematician who joined the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) at the renowned Bletchley Park on the first day of the Second World War. He was just 27. Before the war he had made a name for himself by introducing the concept of a ‘universal computing machine’. At Bletchley…

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