My suggestion for a list of physics books for a school library is A
Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, by Fay
Ajzenberg-Selove. Professor Ajzenberg-Selove writes movingly and
convincingly about the challenges she faced as a woman in physics, as
well as about much else in her life. She's quite an extraordinary
individual. Many of my students, boys and girls, have found this book
very helpful in helping them to persevere through some early
difficulties in physics.
I've copied an excerpt below. The book is listed on Amazon as in print
and available.
Cheers,
Jeff Weitz
"Why did I want to become a scientist? I try to recapture my thoughts
of nearly fifty years ago. The dominant reasons were that I wanted to
earn my father's respect, and that I wanted to be judged objectively.
Because of Mother, my cousins, and the students and teachers in
nonscientific fields whom I had met at Michigan, I had come to feel that
the criteria for saying that a book, or a painting, or a piece of music
were good were highly subjective. I had no difficulty in knowing what I
liked and respected in literature and in the arts, but I did not want to
be subject to criticisms that could be personal rather than objective.
I thought that scientific work would be appraised logically, and
unemotionally, I wanted to avoid emotional outbursts which I related to
the behavior of artists (and of Mother), and not of scientists. (I have
learned better!) I also had more valid reasons for choosing science: I
was entranced by the process of scientific discovery, by the questions
one could ask (and for which one could hope to obtain answers), and most
of all by the minds of the first-rate physicists I was beginning to
meet. I was a physics groupie.
"But what gave me the nerve to go on in science? My grades at Michigan
had barely been at a C-plus level. My Graduate Record Exam score in
physics had been dreadful. I had failed four courses in physics at
Columbia. Yet I had learned a number of very useful lessons as a child.
Among them was that failing at something was better than not trying to
do it. I knew that I had been lucky in the past. I had learned that I
was strong, and that my stubbornness had borne fruit many times before.
I knew that I could handle responsibility. And, most importantly, I had
never been told that being curious-asking questions, seeking answers-and
that being strong was not appropriate for a woman.
Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, from : A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female
Physicist, pp 54-55.
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