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Stephen King, William Gibson and The Quantum Moment

Scintillating stories of science fiction and scientific thinking

The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty

Robert P Crease is a professor of Philosophy, Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor of Physics. The Quantum Moment is a history and an explanation of ideas.

Quantum Physics is a subject understood only by an elite of advanced mathematicians and El Reg commentards, so we are led to believe, but that does not explain the flood of publications which purport to explain it to the layperson. Most fail, like Writers and Readers’ Quantum Theory For Beginners, getting enmeshed in equations or becoming worthy-but-dry affairs like Quantum Biology which we reviewed last week.

The Quantum Moment differs by placing Quantum Theory firmly in the cultural context in which it was conceived and includes culture’s reflections of these ideas. Indeed, everyone from Family Guy to Doctor Who gets a shout.

The book commences by outlining Newtonian theories and describes how the succeeding quantum era can be divided into two parts; the first quarter of the twentieth century or the age of Quantum Theory and the latter half of the 1920’s when Heisenberg and Bohr in particular formulated Quantum Mechanics and things got really weird.

Here are a couple of pearls of their wisdom: ”The theory cannot be expressed pictorially and mere words mean nothing” (Heisenberg). ”Anyone who claims to fully understand Quantum Physics thereby reveals that they have not yet begun to comprehend it” (Bohr).

Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, The Quantum Moment book cover

Such warnings are recklessly disregarded by the authors who plough headlong into the story.

The first part of the book describes how Max Planck formulated Quantum Theory whilst investigating black body radiation at the end of the 19th century and how the idea was developed in particular by Einstein. That is, until in the late 1920s a veritable of feast of theories of uncertainty, indeterminacy and complementarity questioned the nature of existence and causality, and came up with some surprising answers.

”We love paradoxes, supposedly they make us think, but in reality they tell us we don’t have to,” the authors suggest - a little cynically. Moreover, it is their description of the paradoxes and the near absence of equations that are most likely to captivate the reader of The Quantum Moment.

Crease and Goldhaber have written one of the most accessible books that I have read about this subject: the language is straightforward and the science thought-provoking. They are unconcerned about including some of the stranger fringe ideas such as that of Paul Forman: ”Cultural anxieties during 1920s Germany were ultimately the reason why the founders of Quantum Mechanics placed randomness at the centre of their theory”.

The authors ask such questions as: ”Why does the idea of the Quantum still appear as a metaphor in the human realm – wild and mysterious, packed with creative force?”

This book is the best introduction to the life and times of the Quantum era that I have read. Like all the most interesting books on the subject, it is mind-expanding, raising more questions than answers: concentrating on Quantum Theory more as a state of mind, than on elaborate mathematics. The Quantum Moment finishes with a revolutionary call to arms: ”Facing the Quantum Moment requires a new framework for the humanities of the 21st century”.

This is a great introduction for the reader with an enquiring mind and no specialist mathematical knowledge. MD ®

Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, The Quantum Moment book coverAuthor Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber
Title The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty
Publisher W. W. Norton and Company
Price £20 (Hardback), £15 (eBook)
More info Publication web site

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