Word: jakob
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SIPPING COLD, WEAK TEA in his unheated room, professor Jakob, the unlikely hero of Russell McCormmach's new novel, feels tragic and paralyzed wlstfulness for himself, his science, and his country. An old man, whose career was undistinguished, he recognizes his mediocrity. He can't event pass for a legend in his own mind. Even his redeeming, pure beyond ethereal dedication to physics, makes his achievements seem all the more Lackluster...
...professor is sapped of youthful energy, and the absurd, exaggerated pettiness of life buzzes around his ears like a mosquito he can neither see nor swat. McCormmach skillfully tinges Jakob's world with Kafkaesque visions. As he talks to the director of the physics institute, Jakob realizes that the man "hadn't heard a word. But perhaps he hadn't said anything." The resident assistant professor erases Jakob's equations and Scrawls in a corner of the blackboard, "Prof. Jakob's space." The janitor steals Jakob's equipment. Jakob can only retaliate by writing a note to the director...
Physics, too, seems capricious. Like mathematicians, Jakob notes, the physicists assume at whim and derive the consequences. Classical physics, at least, seemed more commonsensical; it had an other-worldly quality that lent its explanations an almost spiritual legitimacy. Equations alone lacked this aura. Classical physics' beauty, to Jakob, sprang from this peculiar marriage of the physical and the mystical...
...Jakob is a character invented by Russell McCormmach, 48, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University. "After years of work on rather standard books of history for the specialist," says McCormmach, "I decided to try a kind of spin-off from scholarly material. Enter Victor." But if the physicist is made of whole cloth, the other personae of this remarkable exercise in fiction and historiography are not, and they rise from the pages as Jakob remembers them and their contributions to physics. There is the fascinating Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, who forged the theory of electromagnetism...
Part history, part science lesson, part philosophical treatise, Night Thoughts is a brilliant piece of scholarship and a profoundly moving portrait of a man and his time. Jakob may not have existed. But the place he inhabited did, and by the final chapters of this ruminative, disturbing book, the reader is likely to grieve for the professor and for the world. -By Peter Staler