Author(s): Manjit Kumar

Science

This is the dramatic, powerful and superbly-written history of the most important and challenging scientific revolution of the 20th-century - and the ferocious debate at its heart.Without quantum theory our world would not exist. Yet for sixty 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 two hundred years of experiments. Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Erwin Schrodinger's infamous dead-or-alive cat are similarly strange. As Niels Bohr said, if you weren't shocked by quantum theory, you didn't really understand it.In 1925 the quantum pioneers nearly all hailed from upper-middle-class academic families; most were German; and their average age was twenty-four. Their irrational, romantic spirit, formed in reaction to mechanised slaughter of the First World War, inspired their will to test science to its limits.Kumar's centrepiece is the fierce battle between Einstein and Bohr about the nature of reality and the soul of science.