My last post mentioned that I read a biography of C.-S. Wu earlier this year. This has been part of a larger effort to start reading the biographies of notable physicists, which I began in the summer of 2023, after watching Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film. So far, here are the substantial biographies I've made it through, in chronological order:
- Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, by Ray Monk (Doubleday, 2012).
- Galileo: Decisive Innovator, by Michael Sharratt (Blackwell, 1994).
- Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Water Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
- Jean D'Alembert: Science and the Enlightenment, by Thomas L. Hankins (Oxford University Press, 1970).
- The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by Basil Mahon (Wiley, 2004).
- Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research, by Chiang Tsai-Chien (World Scientific, 2014).
In addition, I read the following short biographies, again in chronological order:
- Isaac Newton, by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2003).
- Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction, by Frank James (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction, by J. L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press, 2020).
The Bohr book was the only one so far that I've been disappointed with.
In earlier years, I've read other biographies of physicists; the ones I can remember include:
- Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius and Invention, by David Lindley (Joseph Henry Press, 2004).
- True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics, by Vicki Daitch and Lillian Hoddeson (Joseph Henry Press, 2002).
I've also read the autobiographies of Max Planck and physicist-turned-quant, Emanuel Derman.
Future ambitions include tackling substantial biographies of Planck, and more on Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell. In addition I'd like to add biographies of Leonhard Euler, A.-L. Cauchy, Lord Rayleigh, J. W. Gibbs, Lise Meitner, R.P. Feynman, and P. W. Anderson. And ultimately I'd like to include 20th century fluid dynamicists; there exist biographies of Ludwig Prandtl, G. I. Taylor, and James Lighthill, and an autobiography of Theodore von Karman, though realistically I may only get to Prandtl and Taylor. (I have read Iris Chang's Thread of the Silkworm, on H.S. Tsien, which I would strongly recommend.)
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