by Jagdish Mehra, World Scientific, ISBN 9810243421, two-volume set £56.
Jagdish Mehra has spent much of his long career carefully documenting the development of quantum mechanics and the people involved. One of the results is his monumental work (with Helmut Rechenberg) The Historical Development of Quantum Theory. The six-volume/nine-book series, completed last year, is imposing. His other contributions include the collected works of Eugene Wigner; books on Einstein, Hilbert and general relativity; and the more popular The Beat of a Different Drum, a biography of Richard Feynman.
His new collection brings together 37 essays, based on his invited lectures, mostly covering modern physics – relativity, quantum theory and quantum mechanics, spin and statistics, quantum electrodynamics, elementary particles – and physicists – Einstein, Planck, Gibbs, Bohr, Sommerfeld, Bose, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Wigner and Landau.
Mehra is a scientists’ historian who understands concepts and traces their evolution, as well as the personalities involved.
In the introduction to the book, he explains his own fascination with literature, philosophy and history and his quest to reconcile these with his solid grounding in physical science.
