Jim Baggott - The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments

THE QUANTUM STORY

A HISTORY IN 40 MOMENTS

JIM BAGGOTT

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Jim Baggott 2011

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First published 2011

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ISBN 9780199566846

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For MSS,
because every student deserves
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Prologue: Stormclouds
London, April 1900

1 The Most Strenuous Work of My Life
Berlin, December 1900

2 Annus Mirabilis
Bern, March 1905

3 A Little Bit of Reality
Manchester, April 1913

4 la Comdie Franaise
Paris, September 1923

5 A Strangely Beautiful Interior
Helgoland, June 1925

6 The Self-rotating Electron
Leiden, November 1925

7 A Late Erotic Outburst
Swiss Alps, Christmas 1925

8 Ghost Field
Oxford, August 1926

9 All This Damned Quantum Jumping
Copenhagen, October 1926

10 The Uncertainty Principle
Copenhagen, February 1927

11 The Kopenhagener Geist
Copenhagen, June 1927

12 There is No Quantum World
Lake Como, September 1927

13 The Debate Commences
Brussels, October 1927

14 An Absolute Wonder
Cambridge, Christmas 1927

15 The Photon Box
Brussels, October 1930

16 A Bolt from the Blue
Princeton, May 1935

17 The Paradox of Schrdingers Cat
Oxford, August 1935

Interlude: The First War of Physics
Christmas 1938August 1945

18 Shelter Island
Long Island, June 1947

19 Pictorial Semi-vision Thing
New York, January 1949

20 A Beautiful Idea
Princeton, February 1954

21 Some Strangeness in the Proportion
Rochester, August 1960

22 Three Quarks for Muster Mark!
New York, March 1963

23 The God Particle
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Autumn 1967

24 Deep Inelastic Scattering
Stanford, August 1968

25 Of Charm and Weak Neutral Currents
Harvard, February 1970

26 The Magic of Colour
Princeton/Harvard, April 1973

27 The November Revolution
Long Island/Stanford, November 1974

28 Intermediate Vector Bosons
Geneva, January/June 1983

29 The Standard Model
Geneva, September 2003

30 Hidden Variables
Princeton, Spring 1951

31 Bertlmanns Socks
Boston, September 1964

32 The Aspect Experiments
Paris, September 1982

33 The Quantum Eraser
Baltimore, January 1999

34 Lab Cats
Stony Brook/Delft, July 2000

35 The Persistent Illusion
Vienna, December 2006

36 The Wavefunction of the Universe
Princeton, July 1966

37 Hawking Radiation
Oxford, February 1974

38 The First Superstring Revolution
Aspen, August 1984

39 Quanta of Space and Time
Santa Barbara, February 1986

40 Crisis? What Crisis?
Durham, Summer 1994

Epilogue: A Quantum of Solace?
Geneva, March 2010

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic scientist, he now works as an independent business consultant but maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy, and history, and continues to write on these subjects in his spare time. His previous books have been widely acclaimed and include:

Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 193949 (Icon Books, 2009);

A Beginners Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005);

Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004);

Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene (Oxford University Press, 1994); and

The Meaning of Quantum Theory: A Guide for Students of Chemistry and Physics (Oxford University Press, 1992).

The last century was defined by physics. From the minds of the worlds leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the very pinnacle of wonder and to the very depths of despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed theories that would deny us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend the nature of physical reality. It was also a century in which they built weapons with the capacity utterly to destroy this reality.

Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted.

But this success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents.

Rejecting the elements of uncertainty and chance implied by this new theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that God does not play dice. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it. To anyone tutored in the language and the logic of classical physics, this theory is at once mathematically challenging, maddeningly bizarre, and breathtakingly beautiful.

This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story.