Release Date: June 14
Author: Gino Segrè
Publisher: Penguin Books
In 1932, the year the neutron was discovered, the greatest names of what was arguably the greatest age in physics met in Copenhagen to talk shop, among them Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli. This was just as the long shadows of Hitler and Stalin and the bomb were descending over the century, and intimations of disaster were everywhere, not least in a skit the physicists performed for their own amusement based on Goethe's Faust. Segrè is a genuine high-energy physicist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and this is the stuff of which cracking good narrative history is made.