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jasonfurman's review
4.0
An inspired choice to do a paired biography of George Gamow and Max Max Delbrück. They were both born at the turn of the century, one in Russia and one in Germany, both started in quantum mechanics and then branched out -- Gamow to nuclear physics and cosmology and Delbrück much further afield to biology. And hovering over both of them from the beginning to nearly the end of the book is Niels Bohr and the "spirit of Copenhagen".
One of the things this book conveys most beautifully is how Gamow and Delbrück in their different ways created new circles of scientists in their adopted country of the United States, bringing together different disciplines that rarely worked together and pushing them forward onto new questions that had never been asked before. The results were breakthroughs in the nuclear physics of the creation of atoms in the big bang (in Gamow's case) and the forerunners of DNA theory (in Delbrück's case).
What is particularly interesting about focusing on Gamow and Delbrück, as opposed to say Einstein or Heisenberg or Watson, is how much they got wrong. But they got it wrong in interesting ways that led to new discoveries and theories that were right.
Gino Segre does a good job of shifting between the two and shifting between biography, historical context, and science. Highly recommended -- although not as good as Segre's earlier book Faust in Copenhagen, which also portrays the way scientists think and work together, in that case in producing the ensemble production we know as quantum mechanics.
One of the things this book conveys most beautifully is how Gamow and Delbrück in their different ways created new circles of scientists in their adopted country of the United States, bringing together different disciplines that rarely worked together and pushing them forward onto new questions that had never been asked before. The results were breakthroughs in the nuclear physics of the creation of atoms in the big bang (in Gamow's case) and the forerunners of DNA theory (in Delbrück's case).
What is particularly interesting about focusing on Gamow and Delbrück, as opposed to say Einstein or Heisenberg or Watson, is how much they got wrong. But they got it wrong in interesting ways that led to new discoveries and theories that were right.
Gino Segre does a good job of shifting between the two and shifting between biography, historical context, and science. Highly recommended -- although not as good as Segre's earlier book Faust in Copenhagen, which also portrays the way scientists think and work together, in that case in producing the ensemble production we know as quantum mechanics.
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