The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science 1st Edition by Sheilla Jones (PDF)

Description

Theoretical physics is in trouble. At least that’s the impression you’d get from reading a spate of recent books on the continued failure to resolve the 80-year-old problem of unifying the classical and quantum worlds. The seeds of this problem were sewn eighty years ago when a dramatic revolution in physics reached a climax at the 1927 Solvay conference in Brussels. It’s the story of a rush to formalize quantum physics, the work of just a handful of men fired by ambition, philosophical conflicts and personal agendas.Sheilla Jones paints an intimate portrait of the key figures who wrestled with the mysteries of the new science of the quantum, along with a powerful supporting cast of famous (and not so famous) colleagues. The Brussels conference was the first time so many of the “quantum ten” had been in the same place: Albert Einstein, the lone wolf; Niels Bohr, the obsessive but gentlemanly father figure; Max Born, the anxious hypochondriac; Werner Heisenberg, the intensely ambitious one; Wolfgang Pauli, the sharp-tongued critic with a dark side; Paul Dirac, the silent Englishman; Erwin Schrödinger, the enthusiastic womanizer; Prince Louis de Broglie, the French aristocrat; and Paul Ehrenfest, who was witness to it all. Pascual Jordan, the ardent Aryan nationalist, came uninvited.This is the story of quantum physics that has never been told, an equation-free investigation into the turbulent development of the new science and its very fallible creators, including little-known details of the personal relationship between the deeply troubled Ehrenfest and his dear friend Albert Einstein. Jones weaves together the personal and the scientific in a heartwarming–and heartbreaking–story of the men who struggled to create quantum physics: a story of passion, tragedy, ambition and science.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This was definitely worth the read. With great determination, but through a narration lacking strong cohesiveness, Jones tries hard to capture the turbulent nascent years of the new quantum physics as its startling revelations unfolded in the 1920s. We witness the brilliant new proponents emerge, roam through the leading European institutes and periodically assemble; mostly young physicists; many in their 20’s. Their insights into the quantum “action” occurring within the atom deeply changed our world view forever, more so even than Einstein’s relativity. Physics changed, philosophy changed, and the subatomic sea in which we reside was exposed as almost unimaginably strange and unfamiliar in its operation. With revelations came also a kind of darkness: the depths of atoms went from the unknown to the unknowable. Awful stress, soul-searching, and even suicides resulted.*The effort to show the personalities at play here is rewarding and the characters do come somewhat to life (or even death). The story is also helpful in that we get a good flavor of the scientific search in progress. Many important battles are described, e.g.: a man agonizing for years to reach an true understanding (e.g. Bohr); one hitting upon a massively simplifying method (Schrödinger); and another articulating a correct off-the-wall prediction (de Broglie) that helped sort things out. We also get to know their ernest competitions to be right, or at least to have the most useful idea, fought through scientific thrusts and parries inside letters, lectures, and papers.As many other reviewers comment, Jones’s tale is not put together in a way that works very well, due to the frequent skipping back and forth in time and between institutes. A single chronology might have been better, but one also senses that this method would have precluded the insertion of the background factors of each man’s life, factors which illuminate their individually unique struggles. But what I felt most disappointed with was the lack of a summing-up at the end, after that long rough ride of a decade.In the tale, I would have enjoyed hearing less about the domestic and career-searching angst of these men, since it really didn’t connect that well with their individual science views, in preference to hearing more of the intellectual details relating to the course of the competitive progress toward the new science. For example, the theme of how one idea may prevail over another is constantly present in the book and heavily treated in details, but finally given very scant conclusions at the end as to how well it all went, with little modern retrospective. The epilogue jumps a gap from 1927 to 2005 so as to end not with how the Copenhagen School faired (it prevailed), but rather an allusion to the similar messy world-view disorientations we are now facing (potentially) from string theory.—*I also recommend Pais’ “The Genius of Science” to gain a heightened appreciation of the intellectual bravery required of the theorists of the times to grapple with what they were learning.

⭐In my 57 years, I have never read a book quite like this. If you are a simple aficionado of physics (like myself), perhaps having taken physics and P-Chem many years ago, you will be thrilled to see figures like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and De Broglie come to life. Better yet, Sheilla Jones traces a path from the earliest hints of quantum behavior (Boltzmann, Planck) to the full-fledged theories and battles over the deepest nature of the subatomic world around us—a truly mysterious nature that she caps off with a pleasing reveal at the end. Moreover, Jones deftly humanizes these larger than life scientists, bringing us into their homes and into their trials and tribulations which, to my surprise, are not so different from ours today. One tiny annoyance is that, in weaving together the different pieces of this story, Jones jumps around in time quite a bit (just like we jump around in space) so you need to pay attention! But if you do, you will be rewarded with a front row seat at perhaps the greatest spectacle in human history—an intellectual free-for-all wherein us descendants of Neanderthals came to an understanding of the wave-particle duality that sits at the deepest levels of physical reality, buried inside a cloud of electron probabilities. I hope your soul will be warmed by this triumph of better human nature, a triumph forged with little heed to the brutish turmoil that percolated across continents and time in the early twentieth century.

⭐I have not read this book in its entirety, so please keep that in mind regarding this review. I did want to point out one glaring mistake which I discovered right away. Wolfgang Pauli was famous for the “Pauli Effect”, in which things would breakdown in his presence for no explicable reason. And that is the key — “for no explicable reason”. The author, however, chalks up this whole phenomenon — experienced by many scientists and friends who knew Pauli — to physical clumsiness. There is no evidence that Pauli was physically clumsy. The Pauli Effect was infamous because it happened without any physical association — and that’s exactly what made it so strange and memorable. This glaring misinterpretation on the part of the author puts her capacity for fundamental accuracy into question.

⭐We think of science and scientists being stoic and objective, but this intriguing true story often sounds more like a soap opera script. It gives me pause to think that much of what we think we know about quantum physics could be completely wrong, and for all of the same reasons that we see in everyday politics.My only complaint is that the chapters could have been organized a bit better. They seemed to go on beyond the given topic at times.

⭐I say very important because as a science lover I grew accustomed to look at these great men with awe, like they were gods.Now I have been brought to earth by Ms Jones’ nice narrative about the human face they all carried. I would disagree with her when including Jordan in the team and leaving Sommerfeld out. Since I was at 2nd grade (here in Brazil it is equivalent to high school in USA) I knew about Sommerfeld. And, if he didn’t make any revolutionary discovery, he was a powerful mentor of many contributors.

⭐This book tells the story of the early days of quantum mechanics and the people who first developed it, as well as the battle for the soul of it’s interpretation. It covers 10 of the main characters and gives insight into their personalities and how that affected their views and interpretations. The battle between Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation vs the Debroglie/Einstein view is a battle that continues to this day. If you want insight into how the various participants came to be locked into their respective interpretations, this book tells that tale fairly well.

⭐Il libro è un resoconto storico di quanto fatto dai 10 fondatori della fisica quantistica. Vicende umane, accademiche e storiche si intrecciano. Affascinante anche se scritto in un inglese dotto piuttosto difficoltoso da leggere da un non madrelingua.

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⭐Este libro no solo ayuda a comprendr que los cientificos son humanos con sus deseos, ambiciones, miserias y brillantes mentes, sino tambien para ver la complejidad de crear un nuevo campo de la ciencia como fue la fisica cuantica. Verlos asi, cuando no se tienen las respuestas y si las preguntas, incluso no las adecuadas, sirve para entender la creatividad que es necesaria en la ciencia. Para mi es uno de los mejores libros sobre la actividad cientifica que he leido nunca y me ha permitido dar forma humana, poner carne y pasiones a los que solo eran nombres solemnes en mis libros de Fisica.

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⭐No true physics no hystory in it. Just opera soap from very great physicists. But is in context with that happened.

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