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3 books match the query 'Nuclear physicists'

cover of A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist

A Matter of Choices

Memoirs of a Female Physicist

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Rutgers University Press, 1994

When Fay Ajzenberg-Selove became a nuclear physicist, the number of women in the field could be counted on one hand. In this engaging memoir, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove writes candidly about her difficult journey to international recognition in physics. She is frank about the ways being a woman has made a difference in her opportunities and choices as a scientist--and how, by being a woman, she has made a difference in the world of physics.

Ajzenberg-Selove came to America at the age of 15 after narrowly escaping the Nazi takeover of France. She had planned to become an engineer like her father, but switched to physics after she was told the only engineering jobs open to women were in drafting: Marie Curie's example proved to her that women could do physics. Her first attempt at graduate work at Columbia University was a disaster, but she was sturck with the intellectual beauty of the field. After taking a Ph.D. in physics at University of Wisconsin, she did post-doctoral work with Thomas Lauritsen at the California Institute of Technology, where she began writing the first of a series of major review papers on the nuclear spectroscopy of the light nuclei, a subject of fundamental importance to nuclear physics, astrophysics, and applied physics. She continued this work and experimental research for thirty-eight years while teaching at Boston University, Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania.

During her early career, Ajzenberg-Selove was shielded by her male mentors from experiencing much of the discrimination directed against women in science. Her simultaneous battles to become a tenured professor and to overcome breast cancer opened her eyes and confirmed her as a feminist. 

The lay reader and the scientist alike will be fascinated by Ajzenberg-Selove's clear portrayal of her interlinked lives as physicist, teacher, wife of particle physicist, Walter Selove, and a woman who relishes both competition and friendship in a male-dominated field. An invaluable book for anyone contemplating a career in science.
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cover of The Man Who Broke Reality: Niels Bohr and the Making of Modern Physics

The Man Who Broke Reality

Niels Bohr and the Making of Modern Physics

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2026

From the brilliant Philip Ball, a thrilling biography of Nobel Prize–winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the most radical quantum mechanician of all.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the tremendous energy locked up in the nucleus of an atom was discovered and then liberated, bringing both the promise of utopia and the threat of apocalypse. The dawn of the nuclear age is often associated with Albert Einstein, whose iconic equation E = mc2 revealed the staggering energy available from radioactive transformation, or with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the project at Los Alamos to build the first nuclear bombs. But the person who arguably did more than any other to shape the Promethean era in which we now live was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

In The Man Who Broke Reality, renowned science communicator Philip Ball reveals that it was Bohr who first explained the physics of the nuclear atom, and it was his model of the atom’s dense nucleus that enabled scientists to understand how it could be split apart. Ball also shows how Bohr was the central figure in the development of quantum mechanics, the theory of matter and energy that destabilized centuries of thinking not just about the microscopic nature of the world but about physical reality itself.

Bohr’s story is the story of modern physics and its transformative impact on the world. But The Man Who Broke Reality is not merely an intellectual drama. It chronicles a heroic life lived in turbulent times, across two world wars, the Manhattan Project, and the arms race of the Cold War. And it establishes Bohr as one of the most profound, inventive, and iconoclastic thinkers of the twentieth century.

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cover of The Pontecorvo Affair: A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics

The Pontecorvo Affair

A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics

Simone Turchetti

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project.
           
The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
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