Great Physicists by William Cropper, Oxford University Press, £24.95/$35, ISBN 0195137485
FAMOUS physicists are famously overexposed in print. So Great Physicists—a 500-page tome packed with short biographies—could produce a groaning comment like that in the film Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” Certainly here are the usual suspects (with mugshots): Einstein, Newton, Faraday, Planck, Bohr and their ilk, and many others who are less well known but also undeniably great.
William Cropper’s collection is excellent. Its sweep is vast, ranging from Galileo to Hawking. It’s well written. The biographies are organised into sections, by scientific discipline, and each section is headed by a short…
