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Asimov on Physics
Mr. Asimov deals with key discoveries, advances, and theories in modern physics
204 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
9 people are currently reading
674 people want to read
About the author
Isaac Asimov
4,337 books27.6k followersWorks of prolific Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov include popular explanations of scientific principles,
The Foundation Trilogy
(1951-1953), and other volumes of fiction.
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 22, 2023
A funny and informative pop-sci collection of Isaac Asimov's articles on the history of science up to the mid-1960s, in our period of modern physics. Asimov defines the divide in the chapter "A Piece of The Action": In the Classical Physics period from ancient times until 1900, before Max Planck introduced Planck's constant, energy was considered continuous (h=0). In the Modern Physics period, energy is considered to be composed of quanta (h>0). Planck invented quanta merely to account for black-body radiation, which Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and Robert Wilhelm Bunsen had been struggling to interpret since developing spectroscopy in 1859, but it turned out quanta also justify the photoelectric effect, the study of which earned Albert Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1921 (a common misconception is Einstein was awarded a Nobel for the theory of relativity, but it was for the photoelectric effect).
There are a couple of articles about the evolution of modern physics from deterministic to statistical, thanks to Werner Karl Heisenberg and the introduction of the uncertainty principle, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1932. There are a few articles about the work of Sir James Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Hideki Yukawa, but I'm not really interested in subatomic particles.
I'm not that interested in space either and there's a lot in the book (atmospheres, Law of Universal Gravitation, star clouds, on the plausibility of "hyperspace" or "inertialess drive", etc.). There's also an article in there about cetaceans and sound traveling underwater if you're into that kind of thing.
I was really excited by Asimov's writing on entropy, "Order! Order!" and "The Modern Demonology." In "Order! Order!" Asimov explains theories on the infinitely expanding universe versus the finite universe doomed to end in heat death (entropy maximum). In "The Modern Demonology" he explains the thought experiment Maxwell's demon and describes natural selection as another analogy on the illusion of entropy-decrease (called Darwin's demon) that is not accounting for the whole system. Since he wrote in the 1960s, it was long before He Jiankui from my alma mater, Rice University, used CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically modify human babies in 2018 and created a new illusion of entropy-decrease. Of course there is no such thing as a decrease in entropy (maybe with quasars or black holes which are too unknown). Asimov warns, "All knowledge of every variety is in the mind of God—and the human intellect, even the best, in trying to pluck it forth can but 'see through a glass, darkly.'"
Some of the articles appear in his other collection, Adding a Dimension, which I liked better overall than this collection because it included some of his articles on mathematics. The article which also appear in Adding a Dimension are "The Rigid Vacuum" (on James Clerk Maxwell's equations and Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's work on using radio waves for communication in 1888), "The Light That Failed" (on Albert Abraham Michelson's failed experiment in 1882 which finally killed the theory of ether), and "The Light Fantastic" (which predicted in the 1960s that lasers would be the basis of our telecommunications system—they are). I recommend these articles in either of Asimov's collections but I am biased on these three articles because I have two degrees in electrical engineering.
There are a couple of articles about the evolution of modern physics from deterministic to statistical, thanks to Werner Karl Heisenberg and the introduction of the uncertainty principle, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1932. There are a few articles about the work of Sir James Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Hideki Yukawa, but I'm not really interested in subatomic particles.
I'm not that interested in space either and there's a lot in the book (atmospheres, Law of Universal Gravitation, star clouds, on the plausibility of "hyperspace" or "inertialess drive", etc.). There's also an article in there about cetaceans and sound traveling underwater if you're into that kind of thing.
I was really excited by Asimov's writing on entropy, "Order! Order!" and "The Modern Demonology." In "Order! Order!" Asimov explains theories on the infinitely expanding universe versus the finite universe doomed to end in heat death (entropy maximum). In "The Modern Demonology" he explains the thought experiment Maxwell's demon and describes natural selection as another analogy on the illusion of entropy-decrease (called Darwin's demon) that is not accounting for the whole system. Since he wrote in the 1960s, it was long before He Jiankui from my alma mater, Rice University, used CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically modify human babies in 2018 and created a new illusion of entropy-decrease. Of course there is no such thing as a decrease in entropy (maybe with quasars or black holes which are too unknown). Asimov warns, "All knowledge of every variety is in the mind of God—and the human intellect, even the best, in trying to pluck it forth can but 'see through a glass, darkly.'"
Some of the articles appear in his other collection, Adding a Dimension, which I liked better overall than this collection because it included some of his articles on mathematics. The article which also appear in Adding a Dimension are "The Rigid Vacuum" (on James Clerk Maxwell's equations and Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's work on using radio waves for communication in 1888), "The Light That Failed" (on Albert Abraham Michelson's failed experiment in 1882 which finally killed the theory of ether), and "The Light Fantastic" (which predicted in the 1960s that lasers would be the basis of our telecommunications system—they are). I recommend these articles in either of Asimov's collections but I am biased on these three articles because I have two degrees in electrical engineering.
March 19, 2017
In the 1950s and 1960s, Isaac Asimov, one of our foremost writers of science fiction, published a monthly column on scientific subjects of his choosing in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science. In the 1970s, 10 to 20 years after their initial publication, he gathered together articles pertaining to various disciplines and published them in book form, updating them as needed through footnotes. Previous volumes in this series include Asimov on Astronomy and Asimov on Chemistry
This volume, Asimov on Physics, published in 1976 included 17 articles originally published from Dec, 1958 through Oct. 1965. It deals with increasingly complex topics ranging from "What is the nature of the atmosphere,of sound, of light?" through magnetism and gravity and on to the nature of subatomic particles, most of which had not been identified or even hypothesized when I last took college physics in 1955. Asimov typically begins with the ancients', typically the Greeks', theories and then traces the development of the concepts to the "present day," i.e. 40 years ago. Most chapters include inserted profiles of the noted physicists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, and Planck whose theories are being discussed as well as informative sections on such topics as steam engines, rockets, telescopes, and the earth, all of which are illustrated with photographs.
Asimov writes in a clear and readable style so I could follow his general arguments even though I did not attempt to work through the three dozen or so equations. Even though I fully understood less than half of the material, especially "Modern" particle physics, I feel better informed on the subject.
This volume, Asimov on Physics, published in 1976 included 17 articles originally published from Dec, 1958 through Oct. 1965. It deals with increasingly complex topics ranging from "What is the nature of the atmosphere,of sound, of light?" through magnetism and gravity and on to the nature of subatomic particles, most of which had not been identified or even hypothesized when I last took college physics in 1955. Asimov typically begins with the ancients', typically the Greeks', theories and then traces the development of the concepts to the "present day," i.e. 40 years ago. Most chapters include inserted profiles of the noted physicists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, and Planck whose theories are being discussed as well as informative sections on such topics as steam engines, rockets, telescopes, and the earth, all of which are illustrated with photographs.
Asimov writes in a clear and readable style so I could follow his general arguments even though I did not attempt to work through the three dozen or so equations. Even though I fully understood less than half of the material, especially "Modern" particle physics, I feel better informed on the subject.
April 22, 2022
Some essays in it are dated, but overall this is another great collection from Asimov.
August 20, 2018
Very enjoyable collection of essays. The text does seem to alternate between overly-simplified allegories, and complex formulae, but Asimov's witty and charming writing style does more than enough to bring it all together.
Read
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3. "Catching up with Newton": ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Remarkably accurate except for one small, though crucial, error. A dropped book does not accelerate "in the direction of the Earth's center", but orthogonally with the Earth's surface. But this was, and still is, unknown to the "scientific community" (🤡🎪).
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6. "C for Celeritas": ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Nerd 🤓 porn of the highest order! Damn, Asimov understood Einstein's famous equation better than Einstein herself (I'm anticipating a future gender swap)!
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3. "Catching up with Newton": ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Remarkably accurate except for one small, though crucial, error. A dropped book does not accelerate "in the direction of the Earth's center", but orthogonally with the Earth's surface. But this was, and still is, unknown to the "scientific community" (🤡🎪).
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6. "C for Celeritas": ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Nerd 🤓 porn of the highest order! Damn, Asimov understood Einstein's famous equation better than Einstein herself (I'm anticipating a future gender swap)!
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December 24, 2021
-Gregory Kerkman
July 24, 2022
Asimov on Chemistry is much better
May 13, 2023
what are muons?????
March 10, 2024
Asimov is one of the first to write about science in an accessible way. There are some interesting nuggets in here. I like his take on entropy.
September 28, 2024
3.5
First half on gravity and the electromagnetic were super entertaining, however the second half of the book left me pretty bored because of a lack of background in particle physics.
First half on gravity and the electromagnetic were super entertaining, however the second half of the book left me pretty bored because of a lack of background in particle physics.
March 15, 2017
As I said in my review of "Asimov on Chemistry", his first 5 collections of science articles from F&SF were being taken out of print in hardcover and they replaced them with these books that sorted those articles by subject (e.g. which science they're about). I don't have a problem with rereading or skipping essays that I've read, so I enjoyed this.
January 4, 2015
This book is a collection of science essays originally published in F&SF magazine in the 1950s and 60s. Although a little dated the articles are a great way to get to grips with some of the fundamentals of science, physics and offer an insight into the history of science.
Asimov's warm and approachable style make reading this a delightful experience far from the more usual humdrum science texts and each article is interlaced with humor and insights into Asimov's life. Definitely worth a read whether you're "into" science or not.
Asimov's warm and approachable style make reading this a delightful experience far from the more usual humdrum science texts and each article is interlaced with humor and insights into Asimov's life. Definitely worth a read whether you're "into" science or not.
August 8, 2015
My first non-fiction book by Asimov. Very well written, and accessible to people of all ages. It contains several "lessons" in physics, each one presented with a comprehensive historical background. These books stimulated my curiosity about science when I was a teenager, and gave me an excellent primer for more advanced study later in college.
August 16, 2007
The very best.
Read
July 14, 2009Asimov on Physics by Isaac Asimov (1987)
February 2, 2013
Just a collection of previously-printed and collected science essays. Kind of disappointing, although the updated footnotes were occasionally interesting.
September 8, 2016
An excellent collection of essays. Although not a comprehensive treatment of the subject, Asimov make physics interesting and easy to understand.
March 9, 2015
Excellent read, a bit slow at first, but it got very interesting. I'd recommend reading it in pieces because it is rather dry at points.
September 14, 2012
This version was very dated
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews