Quantum Manjit Kumar.pdf
Shay Silvertooth
'This is about gob-smacking science at the far end of reason... Take it nice and easy and savour the experience of your mind being blown without recourse to hallucinogens' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious, impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves.In this magisterial book, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution, and the divisive debate at its core. Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world, the particles and processes without which it could not exist.Yet for 60 years most physicists believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality itself.
In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century.Quantum theory is weird. In 1905, Albert Einstein suggested that light was a particle, not a wave, defying a century of experiments. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Erwin Schrodinger's famous dead-and-alive cat are similarly strange. As Niels Bohr said, if you weren't shocked by quantum theory, you didn't really understand it.While "Quantum" sets the science in the context of the great upheavals of the modern age, Kumar's centrepiece is the conflict between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality and the soul of science. 'Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved', lamented the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. But in "Quantum", Kumar brings Einstein back to the centre of the quantum debate. "Quantum" is the essential read for anyone fascinated by this complex and thrilling story and by the band of brilliant men at its heart.
He describes Einstein, Bohr and the "Great Debate about the Nature of Reality" that played out over a number of years, particularly at the Fifth Solvay International Conference on electrons and photons in 1927, where the physicists met to discuss the then newly formulated quantum theory. It narrates the life of some eminent physicists and their work and also gives a view of the environment of science at that time. It tells the life stories of Bohr, Einstein, Planck, Rutherford, Schrödinger, and others.
A well written and engaging account not just of the work of the great 20th century physicists, but of their lives and personalities; how they argued and competed, but worked together to understand the forces that govern our universe. I have read this book several times and still have no grasp of quantum mechanics, but that is not the point. It the insight into the minds and lives of these great thinkers that stimulates in us the same curiosity and wonder that inspired them.
There are a lot of different versions of this book. Considered a bible of sorts, it captures the history of quantum mechanics from the early breakthroughs of Planck and Einstein at the turn of the century up until second world war. Although the title emphasizes The Bohr-Einstein Debate, the book captures a much wider narrative.
Although a lot of my writing about physics has been about Einstein and his work, the history of quantum mechanics comes up quite often as well. This not necessarily intentionally. Although generally associated with the names Heisenberg, Born, Schr\u00F6dinger and Dirac, there is a lot of overlap in the history of quantum mechanics with other historical figures and topics. For instance, von Neumann is perhaps best known as a brilliant mathematician who did work on computing, game theory and AI\u2014less so for being the person who formulated much of the mathematical foundation for quantum mechanics. Similar for Oppenheimer, who is known as the Head of the Manhattan Project and the Director of the IAS, not as a brilliant researcher on quantum mechanics in G\u00F6ttingen in the 1920s\u2014and one of Dirac\u2019s closest friends. Indeed, as I tried to convey in my essay The Center of the Mathematical Universe, quite a few of the figures featured prominently in the history of 19th and early 20th-century mathematics and physics spend time in G\u00F6ttingen during the time of the invention of quantum mechanics. Norbert Wiener even visited in 1925-26.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Max Born in the quantum revolution. Although it was Heisenberg who formulated matrix mechanics, Born was the one to see the larger implications and include Heisenberg\u2019s breakthrough in a larger research program at the University of G\u00F6ttingen. Written by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, this is a genuinely well crafted biography of one of science\u2019s most influential yet often forgotten names.
Schr\u00F6dinger is one of those names, like Einstein, who is intimately associated with quantum mechanics for his formulation of the Schr\u00F6dinger equation and the thought experiment Schr\u00F6dinger\u2019s cat. Yet, as you can imagine, his influence on the development of quantum theory ran both wider and deeper. This is the best biography of his life, in my opinion.
There are of course, many other good books on the history of quantum mechanics. Below, some are listed. As a writer, The Born-Einstein Letters are incredibly fascinating to me, as is the biography of Oppenheimer by Bird & Sherwin. Heisenberg\u2019s book Physics and Philosophy is much more accessible than one would imagine.