Word: mccormmach
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...MCCORMMACH'S CLEVER and poignant tale of dreams silently betrayed and slain by the whims of time touches the present. Quantum physics and relativity have spawned the laser and computers that improve our lives and the bombs that menace them. And perhaps no aspect of nuclear weapons is as terrifying as their arbitrariness, their capacity to obliterate the hopes, plans, and dreams of mankind. They threaten to make the past irrelevant and the future impossible. They wobble like crockery in the clumsy hands of blind and drunken children, the bureaucracies and coteries that have so far maintained the balance...
NIGHT THOUGHTS OF A CLASSICAL PHYSICIST by Russell McCormmach Harvard University; 219pages...
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...
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