Quantum Legacies (ePub)

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
Schrdinger, 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.