QUANTUM

This is about gob smacking science at the far end of reason Take it nice and easy and savour the experience of your mind being blown without recourse to hallucinogens Nicholas Lezard Guardian For most people quantum theory is a byword for mysterious impenetrable science And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves In this magisterial book Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly written history of this fundamental scientific revolution and the divisive debate at its core Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world the particles and processes without which it could not exist Yet for 60 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 a century of experiments Werner Heisenberg s uncertainty principle and Erwin Schrodinger s famous dead and alive cat are similarly strange As Niels Bohr said if you weren t shocked by quantum theory you didn t really understand it While Quantum sets the science in