Heisenberg Probably Slept Here: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Physicists of the 20th Century (Wiley Popular Science)

Physics turned weird recently--really weird. That doesn't necessarily mean that modern physicists are weird, though, does it? Well, yes and no, says science writer Richard P. Brennan, whose book Heisenberg Probably Slept Here chronicles the lives of seven great scientists of the 20th century--Einstein, Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman, and Gell-Mann--as well as their spiritual father, Isaac Newton. Fascinating and funny, each biographical sketch illuminates the man, his surroundings, and his achievements with unusual clarity.

Writing about the enormous driving force engendered in physics by World War II, with scientists on both sides striving to advance their knowledge far enough to win a terrible war, Brennan shows us the delicate contingencies that led to our current level of understanding. What if the Nazis hadn't rejected "Jewish science"? What if the Allies had assassinated Heisenberg? More generally, he tells us stories of men working like maniacs to answer some of the hardest, most basic questions about our universe ever devised, only to find more questions for the next century to ponder. We may hope that a new generation will be inspired by these stories to take weird 20th-century science much further; perhaps some day quantum mechanics will seem more quaint than abstruse. --Rob Lightner