The Quantum Story A History in 40 Moments

by Baggott, Jim

• ISBN13: 9780199655977
• ISBN10: 0199655979
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-03-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Quantum Storybegins in 1900, tracing a century of game-changing science. Popular science writer Jim Baggott first shows how, over the space of three decades, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others formulated and refined the theory--and opened the floodgates. Indeed, since then, a torrent of ideas has flowed from the world's leading physicists, as they explore and apply the theory's bizarre implications. To take us from the story's beginning to the present day, Baggott organizes his story around forty turning-point moments of discovery. Many of these are inextricably bound up with the characters involved--their rivalries and their collaborations, their arguments and, not least, their excitement as they sense that they are redefining what reality means. Through the mix of story and science, we experience their breathtaking leaps of theory and experiment, as they uncover such undreamed of and mind-boggling phenomenon as black holes, multiple universes, quantum entanglement, the Higgs boson, and much more. brisk, clear, and compelling,The Quantum Storyis science writing at its best. A compelling look at the one-hundred-year history of quantum theory, it illuminates the idea as it reveals how generations of physicists have grappled with this monster ever since.

Author Biography

Jim Baggott is the author of Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atomic Bomb, 1939-1949, A Beginner's Guide to Reality, and Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Quantum Theory, among other books.

Table of Contents

Quantum in Action

An Act of Desperation: Berlin 1900

Independent Energy Quanta: Bern 1905

Quantum Numbers and Quantum Jumps: Manchester 1913

Wave-particle Duality: Paris 1923

Strangely Beautiful Interior: Helgoland 1925

A Late Erotic Outburst: Swiss Alps 1925

The Self-rotating Electron: Leiden 1925

Quantum Probability and Quantum Uncertainty

Quantum Probability: Gottingen 1926

The Whole Idea of Quantum Jumps Necessarily Leads to Nonsense: Copenhagen 1926

Uncertainty Principle: Copenhagen 1927

The Copenhagen Interpretation: Copenhagen 1927

Complementarity: Lake Como 1927

Quantum Interpretation

Gedankenexperiment: Brussels 1927

An Absolute Wonder: Cambridge 1927

A Certain Unreasonableness: Brussels 1930

A Bolt from the Blue: Copenhagen 1935

The Paradox of Schrodinger's Cat: Oxford 1935

Quantum Fields

Crisis: Shelter Island 1947

Quantum Electrodynamics: Oldstone 1949

Gauge Symmetry and Gauge Theories: Princeton 1954

Three Quarks for Muster Mark: Pasadena 1963

The Higgs Mechanism: Edinburgh 1965

Quantum Particles

Electro-weak Unification: Harvard 1967

Deep Inelastic Scattering: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 1967

Asymptotic Freedom and Quantum Chromodynamics: Harvard 1973

The November Revolution: Brookhaven and SLAC 1974

The W and Z Bosons: CERN 1983

Completing the Picture: Fermilab 1994

Quantum Reality

Hidden Variables: Princeton 1951

Bell's Theorem: Geneva 1964

The Aspect Experiments: Paris 1982

Beating the Uncertainty Principle: Albuquerque 1991

Three-photon GHZ States: Vienna 2000

Reality, Whether Local or Not: Vienna 2007

Quantum Gravity

That Damned Equation: Princeton 1967

The First Superstring Revolution: Aspen 1984

The Quantum Structure of Space: Santa Barbara 1986

No Consistency Without Contingency: Durham 1995

The Second Superstring Revolution: Los Angeles 1995

Resolving the Impasse: CERN 2008

Epilogue

Quantum Timeline

Name Index

Subject Index

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