Quantum by Manjit Kumar
Manjit Kumar has degrees in physics and philosophy. He was the founding editor of Prometheous, and the co-author of Science and the Retreat from Reason (1995).
The photograph of those gathered at the fifth Solvay conference on ‘Electrons and Photons’, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927, encapsulates the story of the most dramatic period in the history of physics. With seventeen of the 29 invited eventually earning a Nobel Prize, the conference was one of the most spectacular meetings of minds ever held. It marked the end of a golden age of physics, an era of scientific creativity unparalleled since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century led by Galileo and Newton.
- Prologue
- Einstein is a twentieth-century icon. He was once asked to stage his own three-week show at the London Palladium. Women fainted in his presence. Young girls m obbed him in Geneva. Today this sort of adulation is reserved for pop singers and movie stars. But in the aftermath of the First World War, Einstein became the first superstar of science when in 1919 the bending of light predicted by his theory of general relativity was confirmed. Little had changed when in January 1931, during a lecture tour of America, Einstein attended the premierre of Charlie Chaplin’s movie City Limits in Los Angeles. A large crowd cheered wildly when they saw Chaplin and Einstein. “They cheer me because they all understand me,” Chaplin told Einstein, “and they cheer you because no one understands you.”
- American Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann: “Quantum mechanics is that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands but which we know how to use.” Quantum mechanics drives and shapes the modern world by making possible everything from computers to washing machines, from mobile phones to nuclear weapons.
- Albert Michelson in 1899: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”
- James Clerk Maxwell in 1871: “This characteristic of modern experiments – that they consist principally of measurements – is so prominent, that the opinion seems to have got abroad that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals.”
- Part I: The Quantum
- Niels Bohr: “For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” Albert Einstein: “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.” Max Planck: “Briefly summarized, what I did can be descibed as simply an act of desperation.”
- 1 The Reluctant Revolutionary
- 2 The Patent Slave
- 3 The Golden Dane
- 4 The Quantum Atom
- 5 When Einstein Met Bohr
- 6 The Prince of Duality
- Part II: Boy Physics
- Wolfgang Pauli: “Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort and had never heard anything about physics.” Werner Heisenberg: “The more I think about the physical portion of the Schrodinger theory, the more repulsive I find it. What Schrodinger writes about the visualizability of his theory “is probably not quite right”, in other words it’s crap.” Erwin Schrodinger: “If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.”
- 7 Spin Doctors
- 8 The Quantum Magician
- 9 A Late Erotic Outburst
- 10 Uncertainty in Copenhagen
- Part III: Titans Clash over Reality
- Bohr: “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description.”
- Einstein: “I still believe in the possibility of a model of reality – that is to say, of a theory that represents things themselves and not merely the probability of their outcome.”
- 11 Solvay 1927
- 12 Einstein Forgets Relativity
- 13 Quantum Reality
- Part IV: Does God Play Dice?
- Einstein: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, and the rest are details.”
- 14 For Whom Bell’s Theorem Tolls
- 15 The Quantum Demon
- Timeline of Quantum
