Robert P. Crease is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He writes a monthly column, "Critical Point," for Physics World magazine. His books include Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory; The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance; The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (with Charles C. Mann); and--with Robert Serber--Peace & War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science. Crease's translations include American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. He lectures widely, and his articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.
"Science and scientists are so often seen as cold and emotionless,
but they are passionately drawn to beauty and truth, no less
intensely than artists or poets. One can open this book anywhere
and get a sense of this special passion--each chapter has its own
special feel and delectations, and all of them bring out that
beauty, for scientists, is no less important than truth, and that
one can be ravished by an experiment no less than by a work of
art."
--Oliver Sacks
"In an era in which the public perceives science as a string of
ethereal ideas conjured up by cute men in tweed jackets sitting in
overstuffed leather chairs in the faculty lounge, The Prism and
the Pendulum creates a refreshing portrait of beauty in
science: of men with rough hands polishing inclined planes, peering
into wells, climbing towers, or sitting in the dark looking for the
one spark in eight thousand that would ignite the nuclear age. In
this readable, narrative-driven book, we meet scientists wresting
the truth from nature by confronting her on a physical, visceral
level. Robert Crease, with this volume, destroys and corrects the
'damn good stories' commonly used to teach science, and places
himself among our most important science historians and
philosophers."
--Dick Teresi, author of Lost Discoveries, coauthor
of The God Particle, cofounder of Omni
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