'Rabi' and Alvarez': Tedious, Vain Portraits

The fugue in this case is not by Bach; in fact it is the inadvertent creation of two composers, John Rigden and Luis Alvarez, and the voices that wind their way through this peculiar invention are entitled Rabi: Scientist and Citizen and Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist. Here we have portraits of two men, the first born in 1898 and the second in 1911, both who became physicists during "the golden age," both of whose careers were largely shaped by World War II, Los Alamos and the MIT Rad Lab, and both of whom won Nobel Prizes for their work in experimental particle physics. In studying these siblings we are led to contemplate a number of fundamental questions: Should one spend the summer reading scientific biographies? Should scientific biographies be written by scientists? Do editors still edit books or merely forward them to the printer for binding? Should Los Alamos ...