Unravelling the Mystery of the Atomic Nucleus

Radioactivity, the First Puzzles.- A Nucleus at the Heart of The Atom.- Quantum Mechanics, the Unavoidable Path.- A Timid Infancy.- 1930-1940 : A Dazzling Development.- The Upheavals of the Second World War.- The Time of Maturity.- Where the Narrative Ends.

Bernard Fernandez, a graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, is a physicist from Saclay, France, a laboratory of the French Atomic Energy Commission.  He performed experiments on nuclear structure using the Van de Graaff Tandem accelerator and later on the GANIL heavy ion accelerator located in Caen. From 1965 to 1967 he spent two years in the University of Washington in Seattle and in 1976-1977 a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.  In 2008 the French edition of this book was awarded the Médaille Marc-Auguste Pictet by the Physics and Natural History Society of Geneva.

Georges Ripka, a physicist from the same laboratory in Saclay, worked on nuclear theory, condensed matter and particle physics. In 1963 he spent a year in the University of Pittsburgh and a further two sabbatical years in the University of Princeton (1967) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978). Since 1999 he has also worked in the European Center for Theoretical Physics in Trento, Italy. He is the author of several books, including Quantum Theory of Finite Systems (co-author with Jean Paul Blaizot), MIT Press, 1986 and Vivre Savant sous le communisme, Editions Belin, 2002. In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung prize.

From the reviews:

"This work details the birth of nuclear physics in 1896 and its progression to maturity by the 1950s. ... Readers truly interested in the journey itself will be well pleased with the book ... . Using extensive quotations from primary sources and emphasizing experimental techniques and instrumentation, Fernandez brings the journey alive to deliver an authentic experience. ... It is an easy read, free of mathematics, and suitable for nonscientists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals; general readers." (P. Oxley, Choice, Vol. 50 (10), June, 2013)