From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

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

Manjit Kumar

Start date: April 1, 2014

Finish date: April 30, 2014

Discussion: Book Club 2014

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Apr 03, 2013 Mike W rated it liked it

Shelves: natural-science

This is a good recounting of the historical development of quantum physics. It tells the story through a series of biographies of the major players--Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, etc...

The book contains a lot of interesting information about the confusion felt by these great physicists as they tried to understand the implications of their experimental results and mathematical theories. It became clear over time that the assumptions of classical physics were not valid at the subatomic lev This is a good recounting of the historical development of quantum physics. It tells the story through a series of biographies of the major players--Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, etc...

The book contains a lot of interesting information about the confusion felt by these great physicists as they tried to understand the implications of their experimental results and mathematical theories. It became clear over time that the assumptions of classical physics were not valid at the subatomic level, though Einstein, Planck and Schrodinger were never fully comfortable with the rejection of classical determinism and causality.

There had been a long-standing dispute in physics about whether light was a particle or a wave. Ironically, it was Einstein who revived the particle theory of light, arguing that light was emitted in discrete quanta or photons.

For a long time, the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics espoused by Bohr, Heisenberg and others depicted electrons and photons as having dual particle and wave aspects, but denied that they were either particles or waves unless measured by some observer. This was the famous "Copenhagen Interpretation" in which the wave and particle aspect were "complementary". Moreover, these "particles" were really essentially indeterminate. As Heisenberg showed, it was impossible to estimate their position and momenta with perfect precision, not because of the limits of our knowledge or the imprecision of the measuring devices used, but because this uncertainty or indeterminacy were inherent characteristics of phenomena at a subatomic scale. Until someone took a measurement, it did not make sense to say the particle is at such and such a place. The particles simply were "potentialities", or probabilities. And reality was not really real until someone took a measurement. this prompted Einstein's famous protestation that "God does not play dice with the universe."

But over time, as the book explains briefly in its conclusion, the Copenhagen Interpretation fell out of favor as various rivals challenged it--Bohm's hidden variables, or Everett's many worlds hypothesis for example.

And, while marginalized over the last decades of his life, Einstein might well be vindicated, at least in part. he always believed that there was a deeper theory, a "unified field theory" that would explain the phenomena without resorting to an essential indeterminacy or unreality in nature. Strangely, the book does not mention "String Theory" which might prove to be the "Theory of Everything" than Einstein hoped in vain to discover.

Again, the book tells this story well. It explains clearly the difficult concepts involved in the early debates about quanta, and gives the reader a sense of the personalities involved int these debates. It points out that Heisenberg, who won the Nobel prize for the creation of "matrix mechanics" didn't understand matrices, that Bohr, the champion of the quanta, strangely refused to accept that light too was quantized, that Schrodinger failed to understand his own wave equation, and so on... Such was the confusion into which physicists had plunged.

But in its matter of fact style, the book fails to convey the majesty of the subject, or to explain with sufficient energy the fascination it holds even for intelligent laymen. It's good, but it could have been better. ...more

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Jun 07, 2013 Jose rated it really liked it

Fascinating book. I've heard many anecdotal stories about quantum physics but this a great book that paints the broad strokes as told through the lives of the scientists who invented it. This book specifically focuses on the metaphysical debates between Einstein and Bohr and the fundamental implications it has for the nature of reality itself. It is great stuff. It is also heavy stuff, but a good escape for nerds like me. I think it would be interesting for anyone who has wondered about "Schrodi ...more

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