Krishna
To give this book it’s full title, it should be called ‘Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality’. This reflects the American penchant to have a longer description after the title. We have reviewed science books before here, for instance Sun In A Bottle or Uncertainty – both about particle physics incidentally, which this book is about too.
Manjit Kumar has this amazing ability to make complex scientific facts easily accessible and, like Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, has the ability to mix science facts with the personal quirks of the scientists to make the story fascinating to read. He also has that gift of flawless narration that makes the book flow past smoothly and makes you keep turning the pages to flow along on the delightful voyage with him. Where this differs from the other great author is in the needless increase in complexity and the confusing number of characters who are all described in a bigger length than required, as opposed to just sticking with the expanded biography of just the central characters. It definitely is still a good book.
The book unfolds with the 1927 meet – the most significant meeting in Quantum theory. There was such intellectual power that 17 of the 29 invited eventually got the Nobel prize.
He talks about Max Planck who started with no big jobs and floats his way into interest in physics. He even did not subscribe to the atomic theory in the beginning and only went to it in desperation when the equation for the spectrum of radiation from a metal hole did not pan out in the original equations. What he came up with was the basis of the quantum theory!
Then he moves on to Einstein with similarly astonishing trivia. When Einstein was born, his head was so large and (appeared) misshapen that his mother feared that he was deformed. In addition, he did not speak for several years and even when he started, he had the strange habit of repeating his sentences softly several times until he felt it was perfect and then uttered them loudly. Must have been totally bewildering to anyone who watched, let alone his family!
He then is rejected for several jobs and is desperate, and finally manages to earn himself a place in the patent office as a clerk – in Bern, Switzerland. He renounced his German citizenship as he was against conscription by a German government that he seriously disagreed with.
It is interesting that Einstein grew more religious initially and then realized that science contradicts directly with religion for a major part. He never lost entirely his faith, even so. How Einstein realized that photons are particles (quantum) is very interesting.
Einstein’s fame spreads and he finally gets confirmed as a full professor in a university. But his teaching methods – part of the deal is that he lecture students for a prescribed amount of time – cause raised eyebrows in academia.
He goes to Rutherford and his struggle to understand why alpha rays (which turned out to be photons with a positive charge) bounce back and why they do so in different proportions for different elements and how from these he deduced the structure of (the then nebulous as a theory) atoms. He divines the structure of the atom – not electrons embedded like raisins in a muffin of positive particles but rather with a central nucleus of positively charged particles with electrons on the outside. However, when his protege Bohr discovers that the radioactive isotopes convert spontaneously from one element to another, it proves too much for the conventional Rutherford and even Bohr doubts the explanation he himself gave!
Entwined with the science is the personal stories. How Einstein moved to Germany after the First World War and how rising antisemitism – even among scientists who ridiculed Einstein and his Jewish Voodoo science (The Theory of Relativity) – just as a few samples. These were done openly, even in conferences which he himself attended. When death threats started coming, he started feeling uncomfortable in Germany.
Bohr and Einstein’s mutual admiration is well told. As is Einstein’s horrible treatment of his wife Melva, how he forced her to divorce him by offering more money for maintenance, how he married his long term mistress Elsa, are all told well and do surprise you if you are not familiar with those details.
He brings in Heisenberg and how he felt intimidated by Pauli while admiring him too, and how he found the basis of Quantum Mechanics. He talks about Edward Schrodinger, who was a ‘serial womanizer’ and developed Wave Theory during a secret tryst with a mistress in Switzerland and who scandalized Oxford (when he went to UK after running from the German persecution – he was a Jew) by installing his wife and his mistress in the same house. He came up with the Quantum Mechanics and was considered brilliant.
Beautifully told are the – sometimes bordering on emotional outbursts – vivid arguments for and against the particle theory (and with it, the probabilistic model) and the wave theory of matter. Einstein and Schrodinger were vehemently opposed to the probabilistic model, Heisenberg was firmly on side and Bohr kept an open mind on this.
The arguments of Einstein who could not accept the probabilistic quantum theory and the rebuttals of Bohr finally established the quantum version of Copenhagen (opposed by Schrodinger and Einstein) as the default version. With Einstein renouncing his German citizenship after Nazi’s won power, Plank tries to convince Hitler, unsuccessfully, that there are ‘good Jews and bad Jews’. Heisenberg grovels with Himmler, whom he knew through family connections to remove the stain of ‘association with Jews like Einstein’.
The final intellectual battles between Einstein, who refuses to accept that the Quantum theory is a complete description of the universe and Bohr who is convinced that it is, and is the soul behind the Copenhagen Interpretation is very well narrated. The whole world is convinced that Bohr, Pauli and Heisenberg are right and Einstein with Schrodinger, is not correct. The devising of a lab experiment that shows that Bohr is indeed correct seems to be the death knell on Einstein’s ideas.
Along the way, we learn great tidbits like the fact that Einstein was invited and offered the post of the President of Israel and he declined!
We are told about the death of both Einstein and Bohr who died within a few years of each other and how, later, several people resurrected Einstein’s objections and came to the explanation of a multiverse theory is touchingly narrated. It is ironic that the only theory that makes sense today (or at least one of the main theories) is that of the multiverse, which seems stranger than anything a science fiction writer could have imagined!
All in all, a good book. A comprehensive history with the personalities side of things being given equal importance which keeps the interest going. I think that there is a little bit too much of characters coming in and going out and this makes your head spin a bit, but all in all you will be glad you picked up the book to read.
7/10
– – Krishna (June 2019)