Physics in the Nineteenth Century Book

After reading three of Kragh's books (Cosmology and Controversy [1996], Conceptions of Cosmos [2006] and Higher Speculations [2011]) I decided to read one more - and I am glad I did. Whereas in the earlier mentioned books Kragh delves deeply into science and writes books of 300-400+ pages on just a few topics, Quantum Generations is a much more accessible book. In essence, it's a book about the developments in physical science in the 20th century.

Written in 1997-1999, the book is a little outdated on some topics (such as cosmology), but it gives the reader a comprehensive - and comprehensible! - overview of physics. Each chapter is about 15 pages long and deals with a specific topic, which is a welcome change (in most of his other books, Kragh writes very long and dense chapters of 40+ pages long). Kragh gives detailed explanations about the scientific theories themselves, but also discusses topics such as the militarization of physics after World War II, socio-cultural attitudes towards science, the scientific method as such (and philosophy of science).

The only downside of this book is that some chapters are extremely accessible, and some other chapters - especially towards the end of the book; dealing with high energy physics and grand unification theories - require much more prior knowledge about the respective topics. Kragh could have offered a little bit more background information on topics such as the discovery of new fundamental particles, the development of the weak electromagnetic theory and the gauge field theories of strong interactions. Nevertheless, this was a delightful book to read and helps tremendously to put more basic knowledge of physics in a bigger perspective.