Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
    Unavailable
    Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
    Unavailable
    Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
    Ebook648 pages11 hours

    Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

    By Manjit Kumar

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    '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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateOct 2, 2008
    ISBN9781848311039
    Unavailable
    Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

    Related to Quantum

    Related ebooks

    Physics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Is Quantum Physics Linked To Consciousness?

      Jan 16, 2021

      WHILE most of us have only heard about quantum physics by watching the Big Bang Theory, a week doing nuclear physics in matric led to a fascination for quantum physics – and whether it plays a role in the workings of the brain – for UKZN PhD student

      3 min read

    • Article

      Evil Triumphs in These Multiverses, and God Is Powerless

      Mar 2, 2017

      The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are infinite universes, then we don’t need a fine tuner to explain why the conditions of our universe are perfect for life

      7 min read

    • Article

      How the Universe Remembers Information

      Feb 28, 2019

      It was one of the great missed connections of physics. In 1965 a particle theorist derived a formula for the collision of elementary particles. Twenty years later two gravitation theorists, using completely different techniques, derived a formula for

      6 min read

    • Article

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING

      Jun 20, 2019

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

      Mar 16, 2017

      Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely nothing. For if it did, it would likely be the last large accelerator

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same

      Jan 26, 2017

      The name of the image—the “Flammarion engraving”—may not ring a bell, but you’ve seen it many times. It depicts a traveler wearing a cloak and clutching a walking-stick; behind him is a varied landscape of towns and trees; surrounding all is a crysta

      11 min read

    • Article

      Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

      May 4, 2017

      Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of Time’s Arrow

      Apr 4, 2019

      As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de

      9 min read

    • Article

      Quantum Mechanics 101

      Dec 5, 2019

      Quantum Mechanics 101
      7 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

      Oct 21, 2020

      There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws tha

      11 min read

    • Article

      Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?: The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

      Oct 29, 2015

      It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbi

      17 min read

    • Article

      How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics

      Mar 12, 2020

      Quantum mechanics isn’t rocket science. But it’s well on the way to take the place of rocket science as the go-to metaphor for unintelligible math. Quantum mechanics, you have certainly heard, is infamously difficult to understand. It defies intuitio

      11 min read

    • Article

      In Search of Time’s Origin: What happened before the Big Bang?

      Jan 9, 2014

      Rearrange the following words to tell a coherent life story: A man dies, later he gets married, and finally he is born. Thanks to our built-in temporal sense, it’s pretty straightforward: Tomb always follows womb, it’s never the other way around. Yet

      10 min read

    • Article

      Would You Survive a Merger with AI?

      Oct 3, 2019

      The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently

      9 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Year 2020

      Nov 26, 2020

      Books Of The Year 2020
      10 min read

    • Article

      History

      Sep 21, 2022

      History
      14 min read

    • Article

      Toxic Masculinity at the End of the World: On David R. Bunch’s ‘Moderan’

      Jan 18, 2019

      1. “Quaint they were, these records, strange and ancient, washed to shore when the Moderan seas finally unthawed.” So begins David R. Bunch’s first book, Moderan, which appeared as a paperback original from Avon in 1971. It was to be his only book re

      11 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 24, 2022

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      Geography

      Sep 20, 2023

      CANDICE MILLARD Swift,349pp,£18.99 Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the rival Victorian explorers who sought the origin of the Nile, were both intensely driven characters. Burton disguised himself as a Muslim, even getting circumcised, in order

      3 min read

    • Article

      History

      Sep 20, 2023

      JOYA CHATTERJI Bodley Head, 849pp, £30 Married to Anil Seal, Chatterji is ‘one half of the power couple that has led the study of South Asian history at Cambridge for fifty years,’ wrote Oxford historian Zareer Masani in the Literary Review, and is t

      10 min read

    • Article

      Knowing What We Know

      Jun 28, 2023

      William Collins, 400pp, £20 As Simon Winchester explains in the prologue: ‘This book seeks to tell the story of how knowledge has been passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of its passa

      1 min read

    Reviews for Quantum

    4/5

    117 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Fascinating book
    • 4/5
      sometimes "lost in translation" (i.e. probably it is worth reading in English, not in a translation), it is anyway entertaining and manages to be readable even on the more "technical" areas of the development of physics across the XX century- and reads more like a Crichton "book-ready-for-a-movie-treament-and-script-conversion" than a classical, maybe more precise but certainly unappealing to outsiders, book on the history of the development of a scientific idea (and I read my fair share of those)
    • 2/5
      This was a tough read but if you are interested in the subject matter it is worth your time. The first few chapters are both dry and a tad too technical. Hang in there. It does get better.
    • 4/5
      It is like High School Physics revisited with all the cool stuff that was missing in those textbooks. Manjit Kumar has done a great job tackling this otherwise overwhelming topic. It sure was the recounting of the golden era of physics with such stalwarts, some of them, less recognised, just in contrast with the Einsteins, Bohrs, Heisenbergs and Schrodingers of the world. I personally didn't even know of the existence of Pauli, whom the author has equated with Einstein in sheer intellect. The personal chemistry between those scientists, animated through the correspondences between them, the gradual timeline with non-gradual developments in physics were all very well manifested. The book weakened in the last few chapters, probably because of the complexity of the phenomenon the author was tackling with. The author, perhaps, would have been better off, if he had given a conceptual summary of the developments in the last 25 years, rather than doing such an unsatisfactory job of forcing a closure. There was nothing I gained from the author's explanation of the future efforts made on the leggett inequality or the inequality itself, other than the name itself. The book lost some of its hold on me in the aforementioned last few chapters, but the overall experience was fantastic.4/5
    • 4/5
      Who knew that the world of theoretical physics was so embued with scandal, ego, and rivalry? Although I'm not sure I got as much scientific knowledge out of this as I would have preferred, Kumar did an absolutely fantastic job at bringing the characters in the story of quantum to life. A brilliant read.
    • 5/5
      There are a number of very striking themes and trends in Quantum that other reviewers have not brought out, being dazzled, no doubt, by the swift pacing, tantalizing prose and cliffhanger hooks that Kumar employs so magnificently in Quantum.First, as someone who has struggled to understand quantum mechanics when it is presented in textbooks as a whole system, I was delighted to find that physicists have the same problem. Even (if not especially) Albert Einstein. By taking us through the history of it, and enjoying the exhilaration of every incremental discovery, theory and step, I find I am really comfortable reading about it, and have no difficulty assimilating it. When you're along for the ride instead of the textbook, it makes a gigantic difference. Bravo, Kumar.Second, it became painfully obvious that physics is far more philosophy than science. I felt like the arguments came from my Logic 101 class. Socrates would have enjoyed crossing swords with Bohr. The arguments of the scientists were really basic, philosophical differences of opinion, not the least bit esoteric or idiosyncratic. It seems that medicine is not the only "science" where they tell you to get a second opinion. That was a revelation, and it made physics all that more human.Third, Quantum confirms a lifelong suspicion that this was and is a young man's game. It seems that every time things started to get stale, some precocious 26 year old student would come along with a new portion of a theory, and rock the establishment. And then live off that discovery for the rest of his life - winning the Nobel Prize (as almost every one of them eventually did), getting professorships - but never shaking the tree again. In music we would call them one hit wonders. Einstein was about the only one with two hits - brainstorms in 1905 and 1916 - but then, even he couldn't fathom the totality of quantum physics and never made another major contribution to its progress. By the age of 50 he was calling himself an "old fool".So in addition to all the praise heaped on Quantum for its superior exposition, I think it's a wonderful addition to the discussion of the human condition. Valuable on a number of levels.What a great book.
    • 4/5
      This is a great book covering the history of the struggle to understand the strange world of quantum physics. The focus on the great intellectual war between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein provides the backdrop as the author covers all of the major events from the birth of this branch of physics up until the modern day Throughout this book I found myself recognizing a lot of the physicists from the equations or constants named after them, that I used throughout my degree.
    • 3/5
      Good title anyway.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this book, but it's probably not a good book for most people. While it starts out with roughly high-school level physics being discussed, the later portions aren't quite as simple so that likely limits the potential audience. All that said, it takes its time building up to the fundamental debate between Bohr and Einstein on Quantum Mechanics and I think it does a pretty good job in presenting both sides.

      It's a very well written book on the history of an important field in science. Aside from the fact that it can get somewhat technical at times based upon the nature of the topic, I wish the author had covered the biographies of some of the people a bit better. In the early portions, he covers the biographies of the most important people very well, but the quality and depth of the bios drops considerably as he progresses through the book. Even some people who are presented as important people have somewhat sparse bios. That said, it's a minor point and I'd recommend this to people interested in science history.

      I listened to the audio version and while the narrator did an excellent job, I think portions of the book (not large ones, but certainly parts of it) aren't well suited to audio form. I'm very interested to re-read it in print, though to understand these parts better.
    • 3/5
      Not too bad of a book. I would definitely recommend this for someone who's interested in physics and/or philosophy of science (possible modern world view/post-MWV). The author does a decent job in trying to make the subject seem exciting, however, if you're not into physics or don't have a good basis - skip it. Final Grade - C
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book. I still don't pretend to understand quantum physics, but I do feel that now I can read discussions of it more intelligently. The historical path through it helps by making it clear why the various parts of the theory were developed.

      1 person found this helpful