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ANALOGIES IN PHYSICS AND LIFE
A Scientific Autobiography
by (Université Paris-Sud, France & University of Marburg, Germany) Analogies play a fundamental role in science. To understand how and why, at a given moment, a certain analogy was used, one has to know the specific, historical circumstances under which the new idea was developed. This historical background is never presented in scientific articles and quite rarely in books. For the general reader, the undergraduate or graduate student who learns the subject for the first time, but also for the practitioner who looks for inspiration or who wants to understand what his colleague working in another field does, these historical circumstances can be fascinating and useful. This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution. |
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| Table of Contents | |
| Readership: Physicists, undergraduate and graduate students, historians of science, high school students, and general readers interested in the history of the 20th century. | |
“This is a remarkable autobiography. Richard Weiner was involved in some very interesting developments in physics, and highlights the role that analogies have played, for example in the discovery of the nuclear isomeric shift and in the application of statistical methods developed in the context of condensed-matter physics to the phenomenology of hadrons. Of especial interest is the personal account of the vicissitudes of his unusual life and their impact on his work. As a German-speaking Jew born in northern Romania he lived under four different totalitarian regimes, experiencing both Nazi and Soviet repression, until his final escape to the west via Czechoslovakia in 1969. One of the most significant features is the comparison between these two repressive regimes, showing how different they were despite superficial similarities — another kind of analogy. Also of special note are his experiences in post-war Germany, where he found a failure to acknowledge or come to terms with recent history. This is a fascinating, unusual and most rewarding book.” |
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Professor Tom Kibble Imperial College London |
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| 436pp Pub. date: Apr 2008 | |
| eISBN: 9789812790828 | |
| Purchase book at WorldSciBook | |
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