Science and Cultural Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961)

by Maila L. Walter

Overview

A Stanford UniversityPress classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804717960
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1990
Edition description:	1
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

An examination of the ways in which scientists's beliefs, conceptions, values, and attitudes vary according to socio-cultural contexts. Soviet scientists who immigrated to Israel in the 1970s are compared to scientists from the US. First volume of this new series. it was recognized to represent a philosophical dead end. This is the well-researched and written biography of a New England intellectual of stage in the development of American physics. (NW) P.W. Bridgman won the Nobel Prize (1946) for the work which admirable honesty and appealing human quirkiness, who was nevertheless interesting light other personalities of the time, and an important ill-fated for reasons well worth the pondering. The book also casts in established him as a founding father of the physics of high pressures. But it is for his heroic failure that he will be remembered. An experimentalist of the old school by instinct, he was by accident of temperament, training and timing unable to take in easy stride the theoretical developments (relativity, quantum mechanics) which transformed his field just as he entered into it. His attempt to come to terms with those developments led him to the invention of Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews