Product Description

It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein's new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope.

In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career--his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes. He recalls the great men who taught or inspired him: Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Planck, and above all Paul Drude, whose life and mind exemplified the classical virtues of proportion, harmony, and grace that Jakob reveres. In Drude's shocking and unexpected suicide, we see reflected Jakob's own bewilderment and loss of bearings as his once secure world comes to an end in the horrors of the war and in the cultural fragmentation wrought by twentieth-century modernism. His attempt to come to terms with himself, with his life in science, and with his spiritual legacy will affect deeply everyone who cares about the fragile structures of civilization that must fall before the onrush of progress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #850487 in Books
• Published on: 1991-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Review
"Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist" is an artful experiment in writing the history of science. The book is a sort of prose poem, consisting of the ruminations--part memory, part dream--of the fictional Victor Jakob, an elderly theoretical physicist at a minor Prussian university, who in September 1918 broods over his career through the nights preceding his death. In passages of luminous simplicity, Jako Y contemplates the intellectual upheavals in science from the creation of the German Empire in 1870 to its collapse in 1918, from the reign of classical physicists to the revolutions produced by the relativity and quantum theories...ÝThis is a sensitive and compelling work about the confrontation of a classical spirit with the raw disorders of the modern scientific age. -- Daniel J. Kevles "New York Times Book Review"

Review
Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist is an artful experiment in writing the history of science. The book is a sort of prose poem, consisting of the ruminations--part memory, part dream--of the fictional Victor Jakob, an elderly theoretical physicist at a minor Prussian university, who in September 1918 broods over his career through the nights preceding his death. In passages of luminous simplicity, Jakob contemplates the intellectual upheavals in science from the creation of the German Empire in 1870 to its collapse in 1918, from the reign of classical physicists to the revolutions produced by the relativity and quantum theories...[This] is a sensitive and compelling work about the confrontation of a classical spirit with the raw disorders of the modern scientific age.
--Daniel J. Kevles (New York Times Book Review )

Night Thoughts is an interdisciplinary adventure, designed to entice the reluctant general reader into the unfamiliar terrain of physics; to lure the wary specialist out of the laboratory and away from the blackboard, into the world of fantasy...[McCormmach's] prose acquires an emotional breadth and intellectual depth seldom achieved by the novelist...An innovative and often lyrical book, written with a physicist's precision and a poet's intensity.
--Elaine Kendall (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

An extraordinary experiment in historiography...Based on impeccable and wide ranging scholarship, [McCormmach's] authoritative portrayal has the vitality and directness that only narrative affords.
--Thomas S. Kuhn

I should like to recommend [this book] to a large audience...for its charm, its intensity, and its scholarship.
--Laurie M. Brown (Science )

A brilliant piece of scholarship and a profoundly moving portrait of a man and his time.
--Peter Stoler (Time )

Review
An extraordinary experiment in historiography...Based on impeccable and wide ranging scholarship, [McCormmach's] authoritative portrayal has the vitality and directness that only narrative affords.
--Thomas S. Kuhn

Customer Reviews

Not an easy read, but thought provoking.
Did you know that before quantum physics or atomic physics, classical physics maintained that there was a world ether through which light waves traveled? I had no idea what the struggle this old physicist was having because I did't even know that what he was losing had ever existed. However, I learned a lot, not only about the history of physics, but about a German scientist's view of science and his home land. If you would like a challenge, try this one, but don't take it to the beach.

trapped in shifting paradigms
Victor Jakob, an aging German physicist in 1918 faces the destruction of Germany after World War I, but even more, tries to salvage something from the realization that his life's work has been in vain. He realizes that his personal search for the world-ether has been as hopeless as the Reich's effort at domination. After a century of living with the implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and in a time when string theory attempts to explain it all, it's difficult to understand the unsettling options that bewildered physicists at the turn of the century
<<<>>>
An interesting analogy is given by the old physicist, which takes even greater relevance with the discoveries in superstring theory that emerged after this book was written:
<<<>>>
This novel is sadly lyric and brings together musings on many fundamental themes.

Review of "Night thoughts..."
I recommend this book to anybody interested in science issues, particularly if (s)he happens to be a physicist or a student of the relationships between science, technology and society. While presented as a work of fiction, the scholarship backing the text is rock solid. I myself am a physicist, and the thing that surprised me most is how debates that are usually thought as begun after WWII were well under way even before the Great War, such as the relationship of science to the state, and particularly to the state's war machine. The larger view of life in Germany during the Great War, which the reader will necessarily relate to the later rise of Hitler, is chilling.
The book also provides a warm and informed view of (now) lesser known figures, particularly Paul Drude. I believe reading this book will affect the way I teach electromagnetism and quantum physics in the future.