Book Review: David Cassidy’s Short History of Physics in the American Century November 10, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Carl Anderson, Daniel Kevles, David Cassidy, Freeman Dyson, Henry Rowland, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Melba Phillips, Paul Forman, Spencer Weart
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The following book review appears in Isis 103 (September 2012): 614-615.
© 2012 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press. In-text links have been added by the author, and were not included in the original text.
David C. Cassidy. A Short History of Physics in the American Century. (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.) 211 pp., tables, app., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. $29.95 (cloth).
William Thomas
David Cassidy styles this book “a very brief introductory synthesis of the history of twentieth-century American physics for students and the general public.” As such, it “is not intended to offer a new analysis of that history or to argue a newly constructed thesis.” Nor does it “drift far from the standard, often currently definitive literature on its subject—as far as that literature goes” (p. 5).
Book Review: Randall Wakelam’s The Science of Bombing September 10, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Arthur Harris, Basil Dickins, C. H. Waddington, Freeman Dyson, Maurice Kirby, Patrick Blackett, Randall Wakelam, Solly Zuckerman
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The following book review appears in Isis 101 (September 2010): 671-672.
© 2010 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press.
Randall T. Wakelam.The Science of Bombing: Operational Research in RAF Bomber Command. ix + 347 pp., illus., apps., index. Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. $55 (paper).
During World War II, scientists worked for the British, Canadian, and American military services to study plans, tactics, training, and procedures to see whether military practices made sense in light of up‐to‐date information from the field. The manner of this work varied from conducting special investigations, to parsing statistics, to building sophisticated mathematical models of such military operations as hunting for U‐boats. This work was known in Britain as “operational research” (OR) and was later established as its own profession. (more…)
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