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Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely baffling. From the moment of its inception, its founders struggled to understand its meaning. This struggle was most famously encapsulated in the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein;
Quantum Drama tells the story of their engagement and its legacy.
List of contents
- Prologue
- Act I: Correspondence to Complementarity
- 1: Mutual Admiration
- 2: An Honourable Funeral
- 3: New Ways to Calculate
- 4: New Ways to Think
- Act II: Uncertainty to Orthodoxy
- 5: Incompatible Conceptions
- 6: Measurement and Impossibility
- 7: EPR, Faust, and the Cat
- 8: Missionaries of the Copenhagen Spirit
- Act III: Orthodoxy to Uncertainty
- 9: Postwar Hostilities
- 10: Skirmishes in Princeton
- 11: Juvenile Deviationism
- 12: Passing the Torch
- Act IV: Productive Inequalities
- 13: The Theorem of John S. Bell
- 14: Bell Tests and Protests
- 15: While the Photons are Dancing
- 16: Adventures in Quantum Information
- 17: Where to Cut? Which Way to Go?
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Figure and Photo Captions/Credits
- Endnotes
- Sources
About the author
Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. Trained as a scientist in the Universities of Oxford and Stanford, and a former lecturer at the University of Reading, he has written popular books on science, philosophy, and history. His books include Quantum Reality (2020), Quantum Space (2018), Mass (2017), for which he won the 2020 Premio Cosmos prize, Higgs (2012), and The Quantum Story (2011). His books have been translated into a dozen different languages, and he has won awards both for his scientific research and his science writing.
John L. Heilbron is Professor of History and Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. After training in physics, he studied history of science under T. S. Kuhn in the 1960s, when Kuhn was writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He is the recipient of several prizes and honorary degrees from multiple universities. His books include The Incomparable Monsignor (2022), Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (2020), Galileo (2012), and Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom (with Finn Aaserund, 2013), on Bohr's 1913 trilogy of scientific papers.
Summary
Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely baffling. From the moment of its inception, its founders struggled to understand its meaning. This struggle was most famously encapsulated in the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein; Quantum Drama tells the story of their engagement and its legacy.
Additional text
Baggott is my favorite science writer about physics and this one is a corker.
