Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
by Manjit Kumar (Icon)
Quantum physics is the branch of science most irresistible to raiders from other disciplines who don’t quite understand it. The catalogue of literary-metaphorical abuses of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for example, must run to thousands of entries. This ought not to be surprising — for, as this new book shows, the discipline has from its inception been intimately bound up not just with empirical investigation, but with passionate philosophical arguments about the nature of existence itself. One might not have the mathematics to follow every step of the science, but everyone has a potential stake in what it seems to imply about reality and our relationship to it.
Manjit Kumar’s book is an exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars. In what also has to operate as a kind of group biography of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac et al, the quasi-novelistic character sketches occasionally have a comic quality (”The son of a tax collector, Ludwig Boltzmann was short and stout with an impressive late nineteenth-century beard”), but the real meat of the book is the explanations of science and philosophical interpretation, which are pitched with an ideal clarity for the general reader. Perhaps most interestingly, although the author is admirably even-handed, it is difficult not to think of Quantum, by the end, as a resounding rehabilitation of Albert Einstein. Continued →