Segr?, Gino

"The first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, Enrico Fermi, ... known as The Pope of Physics. A modest, unassuming man, Fermi was nevertheless one of the most productive and creative scientists of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb and a Nobel Prize winner whose contributions to physics and nuclear technology live on today, with the largest particle accelerator in the United States and the nation's most significant science and technology award both bearing his name.... An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi's life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century--including the birth of one of its most controversial disciplines, nuclear physics"--.

Physicist Gino Gegr? profiles the lives and careers of seven physicists whose work in the 1930s changed the face of modern physics.

Explains how the work of scientists Max Delbr?ck and George Gamow in the 1940s and 1950s helped pave the way for modern geneticists and physicists, discussing their breakthroughs in understanding how parents transmit genetic traits to offspring and how stars generate energy and why their work was not recognized until much later.