The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
This definitive book deals with the life and scientific work of arguably the greatest American-born theoretical physicist of the twentieth century. He was a great teacher, a born showman, bongo drummer, buffoon, and iconoclast; a scientific magician capable of transcendental leaps of the imagination. During his career he was drawn into research on the atomic bomb before working on his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Subsequently he developed the diagrammatic technique as a result of which the Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and statistical mechanics. From 1950 he was based at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the superfluidity of liquid helium, the theory of polarons, the theory of weak interactions, the quantum theory of gravitation, partons, quark jets, and the limits of computation. Feynman had a unified view of physics and nature: he took the whole of nature as the arena of his science and imagination. Jagdish Mehra personally knew Feynman for thirty years. This book is intended for physicists at all levels; historians and philosophers of science; the scientifically literate general reader; biography enthusiasts.Jagdish Mehra has been University Distinguished Professor of Sciences and Humanities at the University of Houston, Texas for many years and also served as UNESCO-Sir Julian Huxley Distinguished Professor of Physics and The History of Science at Trieste and Paris. He has published extensively on the historical and conceptual development of modern physics and is the acclaimed biographer of 'The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman'. From Spring 1959 until Schwinger's death, Mehra remained his close friend. Kimball A. Milton is Professor of Physics at the University of Oklahoma, where he leads the theoretical high-energy physics group. He has numerous publications in the field of quantum field theory. He was a student of Julian Schwinger at Harvard and was his postdoctorate associate at UCLA for nearly a decade.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780198518877 |
| ISBN 10 | 0198518870 |
| Title | The Beat of a Different Drum |
| Author | Jagdish Mehra |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 1996-05-01 |
| Number of pages | 662 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |