Love and Physics: The Peierls

by Mikhail Shifman

This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but little-known story that lasted over half a century of world-renown physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peielrs and his wife Genia Kannegiser. Peierls' collected a lot of prestigious awards in his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program (1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at Los Alamos during those turbulent times.

Most previous books on Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native language.

So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal excerpts from Peierls' private 'diary' covering the years 1979-1994 that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with distinctly very different personalities.

468 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2019

Reviews

[rivka]

The author is a colleague of my father's, so he (my father) shared the foreword with me. It's fascinating, and the book looks to be as well!

[Barry Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a prepublication copy. I have long known of Rudolph Peierls’ celebrated work on phase transitions in the Ising model and I know he was a mentor to two of my coauthors (Lieb and Dyson) but I didn’t realize he was also the head of the British delegation at Los Alamos nor of his fascinating life. This book, a collection of letters mainly to and from the Peierlses and commentary linking them together, is a fascinating book and a joy to read. It’s an unusual format for a book on the history of physics but it works very well indeed. One of the most fun reads for me in a long while.