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The Pope of Physics
- Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called "the Pope" by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America's most secret project: building the atomic bomb.
The last physicist who mastered all branches of the discipline, Fermi was a rare mixture of theorist and experimentalist. His rich legacy encompasses key advances in fields as diverse as cosmic rays, nuclear technology, and early computers. In their revealing book, The Pope of Physics, Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin bring this scientific visionary to life. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi's life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the 20th century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.
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- Rubio
- 02-28-17
Excellent, but...
Seriously lacking in covering the Manhattan project. Otherwise fills a definite gap in literature about the birth of modern physics.
12 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 03-12-17
Engaging Portrait of Fermi
This is a biography of Enrico Fermi (1901- 1954). He is Italy’s greatest scientist since Galileo. Fermi was called Pope by his peers. Fermi’s discoveries covered a broad range from semiconductors, transistors to MRI’s, nuclear reactors to the atomic bomb. He won the Nobel Prize in 1938 in physics for his work on artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons. Winning this award allowed the Fermi family to go to Stockholm, Sweden and from there they escaped to the United States. They fled Italy and its fascism and anti-Semitism just prior to World War II. Fermi’s wife was Jewish. They had two children. Fermi became a professor at Columbia University in New York City, then the University of Chicago and also worked on the Manhattan project.
The book is well written and meticulously researched. Segre and Hoerlin do a great job of bringing Fermi to life in an easily readable fashion. Fermi was one of the greats in the field of physics at a time of many great men such as Lawrence, Oppenheimer and Einstein. I was most interested in the descriptions of life in Italy from 1900 to 1939. The authors did an excellent job in bringing these years to life.
The book is about ten and half hours long. Tim Campbell does a good job narratoring the book. Campbell is a voice over artist and audiobook narrator.
9 people found this helpful
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- Javamon86
- 01-17-18
Not good
Just another book about the bomb. Not really focused on Fermi or, as I had hoped, his contributions to science. The book is read by someone who has practiced their gravel voice to a level of perfection bound to grate on the most forgiving ears. I have returned the book because it is crap and will always avoid the narrator regardless my interest in further books he may have read.
8 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 05-23-17
Beautiful!
I just loved this audiobook. Very interesting, both the science part and the story of the Popes life. Highly recomend it.
6 people found this helpful
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- Philomath
- 02-20-17
A fascinating biography of a great Physicist
The extraordinary life of Enrico Fermi like many great scientist escaping WWII is only surpassed by Fermi the great scientist.
One of the few Physicist who was both an experimentalist and a theorist and could very well be considered the brains of the Manhattan Project.
When the likes of Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, and John Wheeler look up to someone, one must wonder who and how such a person lived his life.
5 people found this helpful
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- J Mark Morris
- 08-13-18
Too much useless detail, not enough physics
For me, this book had too much detail about trivial stuffer fluff and not enough detail about physics. I think the authors were too closely associated with Fermi, and especially his spouse, Laura.
3 people found this helpful
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- julio mendez
- 06-24-17
The man behind the myth.
This was a great read; fusing Fermi's personal turmoils, world politics and the events that created the nuclear age, all connected through the Pope's resolute and steady composition.
2 people found this helpful
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- chemprof
- 04-23-17
nice bipgraphy, some good physics!
really enjpyed it, got to know the great physicist, appreciate his role in neutron discovery, and neitrino!
2 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 10-12-21
average
Some Inaccuracies And errors.
Not as good as " The last man who knew everything"
1 person found this helpful
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- Z
- 06-14-20
6 Stars Across the board!
Gino Segrè's and Bettina Hoerlin's brilliant work is a highly entertaining, deeply engaging biographical tour de force of Fermi's life and his underappreciated contributions to the birth of modern science. Enrico - a very uniquely gifted mathematician and physicist - is brought to life in in the book's methodical immediacy. The cast of famous characters of physics at the turn of the 20th Century, of the atomic age and of the birth of modern science is put into a richer context. For me, the entire Los Alamos project now has a completely different historical and scientific dimension. It is no longer Oppenheimer and Einstein! I wanted to give this work a 6 out of 5 stars! But that choice is not available, and so I give it here.
6 huge stars!
Enrico Fermi was indeed The Pope of the atomic age and must be appreciated as much as over-worshipped mostly men of physics . In the informative 42 chapters that cover Enrico's childhood through his serene death, this magisterial biography and survey of the true history of and creation of the atomic age, left me wanting to listen/read even more.
1 person found this helpful
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- Hareth
- 10-23-18
Fascinating Character
An interesting book, certainly in detailing the intellectual development of the young physicist. Learning about his experimental and theoretical achievements, as well as his follies, gave me a great insight into the development of this titan of the field. It does however, deal with his personal growth too, even if in a manner I found forced at times especially when dealing with early childhood. Overall I found it a fascinating read and learned a huge amount from it, definitely will recommend it to friends.
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- Jack M.
- 05-11-20
a fascinating life well told
loved this book. the characters it paints. the great achievements given a rich back story.
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The Last Man Who Knew Everything
- The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age
- By: David N. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tristan Morris
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything - at least about physics. But he was also a complex figure who was a part of both the Italian Fascist Party and the Manhattan Project, and a less-than-ideal father and husband who nevertheless remained one of history's greatest mentors.
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Excellent
- By Peter Ryers on 01-16-18
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Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field
- How Two Men Revolutionized Physics
- By: Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Two of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men - separated in age by 40 years - discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton's time.
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Amazing narration of an incredibly well told story
- By Paul de Jong on 03-01-21
By: Nancy Forbes, and others
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Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat
- How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics
- By: Paul Halpern
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were friends and comrades-in-arms against what they considered the most preposterous aspects of quantum physics: its indeterminacy. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice with the universe, and Schrödinger is equally well known for his thought experiment about the cat in the box who ends up "spread out" in a probabilistic state, neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.
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Very good physics book.
- By Alberto on 05-02-15
By: Paul Halpern
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Exact Thinking in Demented Times
- The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science
- By: Karl Sigmund
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such luminaries as Kurt Gödel and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle left an indelible mark on science.
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Historical narrative, with physics and despair.
- By Philip J. Kurle on 10-08-18
By: Karl Sigmund
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The Quantum Moment
- How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty
- By: Robert P. Crease, Alfred Scharff Goldhaber
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The discovery of the quantum - the idea, born in the early 1900s in a remote corner of physics, that energy comes in finite packets instead of infinitely divisible quantities - planted a rich set of metaphors in the popular imagination. Quantum imagery and language now bombard us like an endless stream of photons. Phrases such as multiverse, quantum leap, alternate universe, the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger's cat get reinvented continually in cartoons and movies, coffee mugs and T-shirts, and fiction and philosophy.
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Interesting
- By Jean on 11-02-14
By: Robert P. Crease, and others
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Tuxedo Park
- A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: John Kroft
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
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Fantastic book, weak technical execution
- By Paul on 10-13-18
By: Jennet Conant
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Quantum
- Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
- By: Manjit Kumar
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Quantum theory is weird. As Niels Bohr said, if you aren’t shocked by quantum theory, you don’t really understand it. For most people, quantum theory is synonymous with mysterious, impenetrable science. And in fact for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly written account of this fundamental scientific revolution.
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Biographic facts not explanations.
- By Terezia on 07-11-11
By: Manjit Kumar
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Conquering the Electron
- The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs, and Scoundrels Who Built Our Electronic Age
- By: Derek Cheung, Eric Brach
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.
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Tech, science, engineering & the people behind it.
- By James S. on 05-29-20
By: Derek Cheung, and others
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How the Hippies Saved Physics
- Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
- By: David Kaiser
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In the 1970s, amid severe cutbacks in physics funding, a small group of underemployed physicists in Berkeley decided to throw off the constraints of academia and explore the wilder side of science. Dubbing themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” they pursued a freewheeling, speculative approach to physics. Some dabbled with LSD while conducting experiments. They studied quantum theory alongside Eastern mysticism and psychic mind reading, discussing the latest developments while lounging in hot tubs.
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Finally, I understand entanglement
- By Gary on 05-27-12
By: David Kaiser
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The Soul of Genius
- Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and the Meeting That Changed the Course of Science
- By: Jeffrey Orens
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1911, some of the greatest minds in science convened at the First Solvay Conference in Physics, a meeting like no other. Almost half of the attendees had won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Over the course of those few days, these minds began to realize that classical physics was about to give way to quantum theory, a seismic shift in our history and how we understand not just our world, but the universe.
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Very interesting and well told
- By Rachelle on 01-18-23
By: Jeffrey Orens