"I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; to the resounding crack of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and leaving the lab stinking of ozone; to the silent, darkened room, with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected bubble-chamber images. Pictures and pulses—I want to know where they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line data of physics." (from the preface)

Image and Logic is the most detailed engagement to date with the impact of modern technology on what it means to "do" physics and to be a physicist. At the beginning of this century, physics was usually done by a lone researcher who put together experimental apparatus on a benchtop. Now experiments frequently are larger than a city block, and experimental physicists live very different lives: programming computers, working with industry, coordinating vast teams of scientists and engineers, and playing politics.

Peter L. Galison probes the material culture of experimental microphysics to reveal how the ever-increasing scale and complexity of apparatus have distanced physicists from the very science that drew them into experimenting, and have fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions much as apparatus have fragmented atoms to get at the fundamental building blocks of matter. At the same time, the necessity for teamwork in operating multimillion-dollar machines has created dynamic "trading zones," where instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists meet, share knowledge, and coordinate the extraordinarily diverse pieces of the culture of modern microphysics: work, machines, evidence, and argument.

The message of modern physics is that physical reality has, at its frontiers, all the aspects of a transcendent order. At the foundation of things, elementary particles can exert instantaneous long-distance influences on each other, can be meaningfully said to have mind-like properties, and can exist in states which are, as Heisenberg wrote, “not quite real, but between the idea of a thing and a real thing.” Thus, just as dead atoms form living organisms and stupid molecules form intelligent brains, metaphysical entities form physical reality. This remarkable book clearly explains the concepts of quantum physics in order to show how science and spirituality are not separate.

Inner Space/Outer Space brings together much of the exciting work contributing to a new synthesis of modern physics. Particle physicists, concerned with the "inner space" of the atom, are making discoveries that their colleagues in astrophysics, studying outer space, can use to develop and test hypotheses about the events that occurred in the microseconds after the Big Bang and that shaped the universe as we know it today.

The papers collected here, from scores of scientists, constitute the proceedings of the first major international conference on research at the interface of particle physics and astrophysics, held in May 1984. The editors have written introductions to each major section that draw out the central themes and elaborate on the primary implications of the papers that follow.

Christina Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach have created in these two volumes a panoramic history of German theoretical physics. Bridging social, institutional, and intellectual history, they chronicle the work of the researchers who, from the first years of the nineteenth century, strove for an intellectual mastery of nature.

Volume 1 opens with an account of physics in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century and of German physicists' reception of foreign mathematical and experimental work. Jungnickel and McCormmach follow G. S. Ohm, Wilhelm Weber, Franz Neumann, and others as these scientists work out the new possibilities for physics, introduce student laboratories and instruction in mathematical physics, organize societies and journals, and establish and advance major theories of classical physics. Before the end of the nineteenth century, German physics and its offspring, theoretical physics, had acquired nearly their present organizational forms. The foundations of the classical picture of the physical world had been securely laid, preparing the way for the developments that are the subject of volume 2.

Winner of the 1987 Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society

"A majestic study of a most important spoch of intellectual
history."—Brian Pippard, Times Literary Supplement

"The authors' use of archival sources hitherto almost
untouched gives their story a startling vividness. These volumes
are among the finest works produced by historians of physics."—Jed
Z. Buchwald, Isis

"The authors painstakingly reconstruct the minutiae of
laboratory budgets, instrument collections, and student numbers;
they disentangle the intrigues of faculty appointments and the
professional values those appointments reflected; they explore
collegial relationships among physicists; and they document the
unending campaign of scientists to wring further support for
physics from often reluctant ministries."—R. Steven Turner, Science

"Superbly written and exhaustively researched."—Peter Harman,
Nature

If offered the chance—by cloak, spell, or superpower—to be invisible, who wouldn’t want to give it a try? We are drawn to the idea of stealthy voyeurism and the ability to conceal our own acts, but as desirable as it may seem, invisibility is also dangerous. It is not just an optical phenomenon, but a condition full of ethical questions. As esteemed science writer Philip Ball reveals in this book, the story of invisibility is not so much a matter of how it might be achieved but of why we want it and what we would do with it.

In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy.  Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII.  Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries.

In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are.