| The Quantum Story Jaggott |
| 1 | ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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 1939-49 (Icon Books, 2009); A Beginner's 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). |
| 2 | This page intentionally left blank PREFACE The last century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's 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. |
| 3 | 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. |
| 4 | 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. |
| 5 | The charismatic American physicist Richard Fey- nman 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 breathtak- ingly beautiful. This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story. If we fix on Max Planck's discovery of his 'quantum of action' in December 1900 as the historical origin of the quantum theory, then as I write this theory is 110 years old. |
| 6 | Time enough, you would have thought, for physicists to get to grips with it and understand what it means. Time enough to come to terms with what quantum theory has to say about chance and causality and the nature of physical reality. And yet, if anything, the sense of shock has increased, not diminished, with the passing of time. While nobody really understands how quantum theory actually works, the rules of its application are unquestioned and the accuracy and precision of its predictions are unsurpassed in the entire history of science. |
| 7 | Although heated debate continues about how quantum theory should be interpreted, there can be no debate about whether or not the theory is fundamentally correct. For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigour would reveal the true mechanisms of nature. And yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. |
| 8 | Instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world. Quantum theory pushed us to the edge of an epistemological precipice. Since the mid-1920s we have lived in fear of stepping over the edge. This book is a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, from its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black-body radiation in 1900 to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, over a century later. |
| 9 | It is a history told in forty 'moments', significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. This history takes us on a long journey. Part I deals with Planck's discovery in 1900 and traces the development of early quantum theory through Einstein's light-quantum hypothesis, Bohr's quantum theory of the atom, Louis de Broglie's dual wave-particle hypothesis, Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, the puzzling phenomenon of electron spin, and Wolfgang Pauli's exclusion principle. |
| 10 | This section concludes with Erwin Schrodinger's 'late erotic outburst', which led him to wave mechanics in December 1925. In Part II, the book traces the development of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. We move from Max Born's interpretation of the significance of Schrodinger's wavefunction in 1926, via the intense debates between Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger on the reality of quantum jumps, the development of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to Bohr's Como lecture in September 1927. |
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