Gamow G. The great physicists from Galileo to Einstein

Dover Publications, 1988. — 338 p.Widely recognized as one of the 20th century's foremost physicists, George Gamow was also an unusually capable popularizer of science. His talents are vividly revealed in this exciting and penetrating explanation of how the central laws of physical science evolved—from Pythagoras' discovery of frequency ratios in the sixth century B.C. to today's research on elementary particles.
Unlike many books on physics which focus entirely on fact and theory with little or no historic detail, this work incorporates fascinating personal and biographical data about the great physicists past and present. Thus Dr. Gamow discusses on an equal basis the trial of Galileo and the basic laws of mechanics which he discovered, or gives his personal recollections about Niels Bohr along with detailed discussion of Bohr's atomic model. You'll also find revealing glimpses of Newton, Huygens, Heisenberg, Pauli, Einstein and many other immortals of science.
Each chapter is centered around a single great figure or, at most, two, with other physicists of the era and their contributions forming a background. Major topics include the dawn of physics, the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, Newtonian physics, heat as energy, electricity, the relativistic revolution, quantum theory, and the atomic nucleus and elementary particles.
As Dr. Gamow points out in the Preface, the aim of this book is to give the reader the feeling of what physics is, and what kinds of people physicists are. This delightfully informal approach, combined with the book's clear, easy-to-follow explanations, will especially appeal to young readers but will stimulate and entertain science enthusiasts of all ages.
P.S. This Dover edition, first published in 1988, is an unabridged and unaltered republication at Biography of Physics, originally published by Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York in 1961 in the "Harper Modern Science Series."