Inward bound : of matter and forces in the physical world

Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord was a publishing phenomenon: a mathematically sophisticated exposition of the science and the life of Albert Einstein that reached a huge audience and won an American Book Award. Reviewers hailed the book as "a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style" (The New York Times Book Review), "an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man" (Christian Science Monitor), and "a fine book" (Scientific American). In this groundbreaking new volume, Pais undertakes a history of the physics of matter and of physical forces since the discovery of x-rays. The book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what at the time may have seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight emerges as a logical sequence of events. Pais, a noted physicist, was personally involved in many of the developments he describes, and thus Inward Bound, like his earlier book, is filled with unique insights into the world of big and small physics. Between 1895 and 1983, the period he covers, the smallest distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold, Pais notes. Along this incompletely traveled "road inward," scientists have established markers that later generations will rank among the principal monuments of the twentieth century. In alternating technical and nontechnical sections, this magisterial survey richly conveys what has been discovered about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject, and the forces that act on them. But the advances have certainly not come smoothly. The book shows that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big money. About the Author: Abraham Pais is Detlev W. Bronk Professor of Physics at the Rockefeller University. The author of the prizewinning biography of Einstein now undertakes a history of modern physics

The history of physics since the discovery of X-rays would be too simplistic a description of this book. Certainly it covers the historical period from the late nineteenth century to the present day, but the book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years or so, but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what, at the time, seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight presents a logical narrative. The author, himself a notable physicist and author of the highly successful Subtle is the Lord (Clarendon Press 1982), was personally involved in many of the developments described in the book. As with his previous book, unique insights into the world of big and small physics are to be gained from this major work.

• Purpose and plan
• PART I: 1895-1945: A HISTORY
• The new rays
• From uranic rays to radioactivity
• The first particle
• Interlude: earliest physiological discoveries
• Radioactivity's three early puzzles
• Pitfalls of simplicity
• ss-spectra 1907-1914
• Atomic structure and spectral lines
• `It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity'
• Nuclear physics' tender age
• Quantum mechanics, an essay
• First encounters with symmetry and invariance
• Nuclear physics: the age of paradox
• Quantum fields, or how particles are made and how they disappear
• Battling the infinite
• In which the nucleus acquires a new constituent, loses an old one, reveals new forces with new symmetries, and is explored by new experimental methods - the 1930s
• PART II: THE POSTWAR YEARS: A MEMOIR
• Of quantum electrodynamics' triumphs and limitations and of a new particle sobering impact
• In which particle physics enters the era of big machines and big detectors and pion physics goes through ups and downs
• Onset of an era: new forms of matter appear, old symmetries crumble
• Essay on modern times: 1960-83
• Being a conclusion that starts as epilog and ends as prolog.