Dear Commons Community,
For those interested in the battles of the minds among the likes of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Pauley, and others over quantum mechanics, I have just finished reading and would recommend Quantum by the science writer, Manjit Kumar. It is a book loaded with the stories of what some consider the greatest intellectual debate of the 20th century. In addition to the back and forth among the titans of science, Kumar also provides good explanations of the complex theories associated with the quantum. Neils Bohr was quoted as saying that: “When it comes to the quantum, we must realize that words don’t fit.” Here is an excerpt from the New York Times book review:
“Quantum mechanics is the most revolutionary scientific theory to appear in the past 150 years. In the atomic domain, it superseded laws first set out by Isaac Newton a quarter of a millennium earlier and has since had an unbroken string of successes. Today, it continues to give an utterly reliable account of the behavior of the subatomic world, yet there are nagging doubts that there is something rotten at its core.
In his lively new book, “Quantum,” the science writer Manjit Kumar cites a poll about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, taken among physicists at a conference in 1999. Of the 90 respondents, only four said they accepted the standard interpretation taught in every undergraduate physics course in the world. Thirty favored a modern interpretation, laid out in 1957 by the Princeton theoretician Hugh Everett III, while 50 ticked the box labeled “none of the above or undecided.” Almost a century after a few physicists first set out the basic theory, quantum mechanics is still a work in progress.”
The review concludes with the following:
“In the late 1970s, I had the pleasure of talking with John Bell about the Bohr-Einstein debates during a train journey from Oxford to London. Every seat was taken, so we had to stand. Pressed against me by sullen commuters, Bell summarized his apparently reluctant conclusion as we pulled into Paddington station: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”
Great read!
Tony
