Book description
For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious,
impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling
for scientists themselves. Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and
superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution,
and the divisive debate at its heart. For 60 years most physicists
believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality
itself. Yet Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the
greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century. Quantum sets
the science in the context of the great upheavals of the modern age.
In 1925 the quantum pioneers nearly all hailed from upper-middle-class
academic families; most were German; and their average age was 24. But
it was their irrational, romantic spirit, formed in reaction to the
mechanised slaughter of the First World War that inspired their will
to test science to its limits. The essential read for anyone
fascinated by this complex and thrilling story and by the band of
young men at its heart
Manjit Kumar was the editor of Prometheus, a journal that
covered the arts, sciences and humanities and has written for the
Guardian, the TLS and the Irish Times. He is the co-author of Science
and the Retreat from Reason, an adapted chapter of which Michael Frayn
described as 'the clearest account I've read yet of the development of
quantum mechanics.'
