Quantum LegaciesAuthor :
Paperback
Published : Thursday 16 June 2022
Description
A series of engaging essays that explore iconic moments of discovery and debate in physicists' ongoing quest to understand the quantum world. 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 Schroedinger, 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.
You may also like ...
by
Paperback
25 Feb 2024
Ethics and moral philosophy
€46.79
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
12 May 2023
The Arts: treatments and subjects
€173.16
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
25 Oct 2022
Biography: science, technology and medicine
€31.59
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
16 Jun 2022
History of science
€17.55
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
Reviews