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The Ultimate Force
Gravity - Creator of Worlds
By Louis Girifalco
Oxford, 320 pp. $39.95
Faust in Copenhagen
A Strugle for the Soul of Physics
By Gino Segrè
Viking. 384 pp. $29.95
Reviewed by Richard Di Dio
Philadelphia Inquirer - Monday, Dec 31, 2007
You think you can hear it, but you can't. A jumble of solid matter and hot gases, infused with cosmic radiation, swirls around the sun. With no atmosphere to carry sound, there is only a silent whoosh as the debris that forms the building blocks of the solar system accretes into wispy proto-planets, which soon collapse under their own weight into solid chunks of elliptically orbiting ice and rock.
Gravity, the force that is always with us, tugging our bones whenever we take a step, is the silent choreographer of this dance. What this all-powerful force can assemble, however, can just as easily be obliterated by the forces of personality and history.
In a unique publishing feat, two physicists from the University of Pennsylvania have written equally remarkable stories of physics and physicists in which all of those forces play starring roles. Both The Universal Force: Gravity - Creator of Worlds, by Louis Girifalco, and Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, by Gino Segrè, combine science, history and culture in rich narratives of the very human quest to understand the nature of the physical world.
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