Will I love Quantum?

Given the radically distinct and often incongruent views of what quantum physics means, it is wise to glean a balanced sense of many views by studying the topic's history. Kumar's telling of the great, decades-long debate between two of the field's leading practitioners is authoritative and excitingly told. The book centers on the founding of quantum physics during the 1920s, the famous 1927 Solvay Conference on photons and electrons, and the thoughtful debate between Bohr and Einstein concerning the nature of reality. The author is a physicist, philosopher, and science writer.

The two towering figures of 20th-century physics were the German physicist Albert Einstein and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Both revolutionized our view of ultimate reality, with Einstein changing our picture of space, time and gravity, and Bohr changing our view of the submicroscopic world of atoms and their constituents. It is on this latter subject – “quantum theory” – that the two great friends clashed most fiercely. And it is the twists and turns of their titanic debate that Manjit Kumar recounts in such engaging detail in this page-turning account.

The Einstein-Bohr debate could not have been more important:… show more.