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The article reviews the book "Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture," by Alan Sokal.

The article reviews several books on physics, including "Discovering the Expanding Universe," by Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri, "Science: A Four Thousand Year History," by Patricia Fara, and "A Nuclear Winter's Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s," by Lawrence Badash.

The article reviews the book "Objectivity," by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.

The article reviews several books "The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science," by Sheilla Jones, "Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry," by Leo Beranek, and "The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter," by Helen R. Quinn and Yossi Nir.

The article reviews several books, including "J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life," by Abraham Pais, "Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy," by Mario Biagioli, and "Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century," by Domenico Bertoloni Meli.

The article reviews the book "Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves," by Harry Collins.

The article reviews the book "The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation," by Kent W. Staley.

Reviews the book "The Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation," edited by Hans Radder.

Reviews the book "Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in the Careers of Experimental Scientists," by Frederic Lawrence Holmes.

In his introductory remarks Emilio Segre states that it is not his purpose to write a history of modern physics, but rather to give an impressionistic account of events which illustrates 'that physics, too, has a rich human component' (p. 1). Despite Segre's disclaimer, the book has some success in fulfilling the first task, but almost none with the second. Although the book contains brief biographies of many leading physicists of the twentieth century and numerous anecdotes and photographs, there is almost nothing that illuminates either the scientific work or the personalities of these scientists. Instead we are given accounts which appear in any popular history of modern physics, including such stale stories such as Pauli's unhappiness over his inability to explain the anomalous Zeeman effect and Bohr's statement that horsehoes bring luck even to those who do not believe in them. A rare exception is Segre's citation of Marie Curie's comment: 'In science we should concern ourselves with things, not people' (p. 1), and his later mention of the scandal caused by her affair, after her husband's death, with Paul Langevin, a married physicist. This illustrates the difference between a scientist's public and private behaviour, a topic unexplored by Segre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Kuhn's book is a detailed, thorough, idiosyncratic and revisionist history of the origins of quantum theory. The study concentrates on the work of Max Planck, who is generally credited with introducing the concept of quantization into physics, beginning with his early work on thermodynamics and irreversibility. Kuhn correctly emphasizes the importance of Boltzmann's statistical approach to the development of Planck's work. This chapter on Boltzmann is, in fact, one of the finest illustrations of the 'autonomy of theoretical science' in which major theoretical advances are made in the absence of experimental data. Kuhn then discusses Planck's work on the law of black-body radiation in 1900 and 1901, which he interprets as a purely classical theory, a point which will be discussed in detail below. He then goes on to consider work which he does regard as introducing the quantum discontinuity into physics, notably that of Ehrenfest and Einstein, and the subsequent acceptance of this view. The book closes with a discussion of the further applications of the quantum to other areas of physics and Planck's 'second theory' of black'-body radiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book 'The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory,' by Arthur Fine.

Reviews the book 'The Birth of Particle Physics,' edited L.M. Brown and L. Hoddeson.