From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists to their Discoveries

Preface
1. Introduction
2. H. Becquerel, the Curies, and the Discovery of Radioactivity
3. Rutherford in the New World: The Transmutation of Elements
4. Planck, Unwilling Revolutionary: The Idea of Quantization
5. Einstein--New Ways of Thinking: Space, Time, Relativity, and Quanta
6. Sir Ernest and Lord Rutherford of Nelson
7. Bohr and Atomic Models
8. A True Quantum Mechanics at Last
9. The Wonder Year 1932: Neutron, Positron, Deuterium, and Other Discoveries
10. Enrico Fermi and Nuclear Energy
11. E. O. Lawrence and Particle Accelerators
12. Beyond the Nucleus
13. New Branches from the Old Stump
Conclusions
Appendix 1. Stefan's law. Wien's law.
Appendix 2. Planck's hunt for the blackbody radiation formula
Appendix 3. Einstein's heuristic argument for postulating the existence of light quanta
Appendix 4. Brownian motion
Appendix 5. Blackbody energy fluctuations according to Einstein
Appendix 6. Specific heat of solids according to Einstein
Appendix 7. A and B of Einstein
Appendix 8. J. J. Thomson's parabola method for finding elm of ions
Appendix 9. Bohr's hydrogen atom
Appendix 10. Quantum mechanics in a nutshell
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Emilio Segrè (1905–1989) became, in 1928, the first student to earn a doctorate in physics at The University of Rome under Enrico Fermi. A decade later, restrictive fascist laws against Jews in academic positions in Italy turned Segrè into an academic refugee — he settled in Berkeley where, in 1955, with colleague Owen Chamberlain, he proved the existence of the antiproton, a negatively charged proton that destroys itself as well as the matter it strikes. In 1959, Segrè and Chamberlain shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on antiproton.

From 1943 to 1946, Segrè worked as a group leader on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In his 1970 book about Fermi, Segrè recalled a crucial atomic test in the New Mexico desert: "In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believed that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible."

It always seems an opportunity that should not be missed when a major participant in the world of science takes the time and makes the effort to write about his field for a general audience. At Dover we were very pleased to acquire from Emilio Segrè's heirs the rights to publish his outstanding two-volume history of physics written for the general reader and historian of science: From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves: Classical Physicists and Their Discoveries and From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries, both reprinted by Dover in 2007.