A series of engaging essays that explore iconic moments of discovery
and debate in physicists' ongoing quest to understand the quantum
world.
The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously
bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that
tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive
nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more
than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual
uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social
and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism,
cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age.
In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic
episodes in physicists' still-unfolding quest to understand space, time,
and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays,
Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great
minds of the era--Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking,
and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature--as
they have tried to make sense of a messy world.
Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the
dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar
political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own,
researchers' ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here
and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that
might reach beyond a given researcher's limited view. In Quantum
Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to
forge some shared understanding between individuals and across
generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between
scientific exploration and the human condition.
