The Nuclear Muse

Name: The Nuclear Muse
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Price: 52.99 AUD
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Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs

By: John Canaday

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Hardcover | 30 October 2000

At a Glance

Hardcover
340 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.88 x 2.54

Hardcover

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The Nuclear Muse urges its readers to cross the boundary between the humanities and the sciences. John Canaday dives deep into the volumes of discourse involved in the construction of the first atomic bombs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to discover the role rhetoric plays in the formulation and expression of scientific ideas.

Using techniques of literary criticism, Canaday analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists before, during, and after the Second World War. These include Niels Bohr's presentations of complementarity in "The Quantum Postulate"; the Blegdamsvej Faust, a dramatic production in which a group of physicists rewrote Goethe's Faust with themselves as the main characters; The Los Alamos Primer, the technical lectures used for training newcomers to Los Alamos; the Los Alamos scientists' descriptions of their work and of the Trinity test; and Leo Szilard's post-war novella, The Voice of the Dolphins. By refusing to give in to the common notion that science is a language foreign to non-scientists, The Nuclear Muse offers new insights into the methods of nuclear physics and underscores the relation of physics to other social forms of knowledge.

Industry Reviews

"The existence of 'the bomb' as a literary device is, Canaday demonstrates, as significant as its military and political reality. A fascinating and literate glimpse at the words, metaphors, texts, and subtexts that have shaped our nuclear age."-Richard Wolfson, author of Nuclear Choices "Physicists in the first half of this century became caught up in knowledge, ways of doing science, military projects, and social consequences that pushed their means of representation and understanding to the limit. This important study reveals how the Los Alamos physicists adopted literary modes of expression to come to terms with the worlds they were making and transforming."-Charles Bazerman, author of Shaping Written Knowledge "A revelatory exploration of the relation between literary and scientific languages, which John Canaday analyzes with an exceptional sophistication that combines analytical rigor and a wonderful aesthetic and moral sensibility."-Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University "A stunning examination of how nuclear physicists of the early twentieth century used literary conventions to translate their discoveries about nature into human language, and used that same language to deal with the human and moral consequences of their development of the bomb."-Nicholas Clifford, Middlebury College "Canaday's insightful study has added a fourth dimension to our understanding of how we 'learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.'"-Martin J. Sherwin, author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies

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Illustrations	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Introduction: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs	p. 3
"What We Can Say about Nature": Metaphor, Analogy, and the Birth of Subatomic Physics	p. 31
"Wandering on New Paths": Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle	p. 55
"The Sense of Option in Knowledge": The Blegdamsvej Faust and Quantum Mechanics	p. 81
The Los Alamos Primer: The Uses of Fiction in Founding a Laboratory	p. 109
A City on "The Hill": Decoding Life at Los Alamos	p. 139
New Worlds, Old Words: The Exploration and Discovery of Nuclear Physics	p. 161
"Taking the Cloth": The Moral Texture of Los Alamos	p. 183
"Beggared Description": Writing Nuclear Weapons	p. 205
Physics in Fiction: "The Voice of the Dolphins" and Riddley Walker	p. 227
Notes	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 285
Index	p. 301
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

The Nuclear Muse

Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

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How to return your order

Defective items

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