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Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality | 
 enlarge | Author: Manjit Kumar
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £20.00
Buy New: £8.85
You Save: £11.15 (56%)
New (23) Used (5) from £8.85
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 913
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.8 x 1.7
ISBN: 1848310293
EAN: 9781848310292
ASIN: 1848310293
Publication Date: October 2, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Quantum Theory - The Human Story October 17, 2008
Jenny Gardener (London)
25 out of 30 found this review helpful
This is fascinating book written as a narrative history of those scientists who contributed to the development of Quantum Theory - one of the most important challenges to orthodox thinking in the whole history of ideas.
The book does a very good job of establishing how classical physics of the 19th Century was seen as completed and except for a few minor details that needed tidying up, the consensus was that nothing really fundamental at a theoretical level was left to discover.
Kumar explores how this certainty that physics was done and dusted came to unravel and how an idea as counter intuitive as the quantum came to be accepted by most physicists.
This manner of exploring quantum theory through its historical development allows anyone with a basic grasp of science to understand why it is so revolutionary in its implications. At the centre of this story is the struggle between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about what our attitude to the reality should be.
Mixing historical narrative with the scientific ideas that were in contention brings quantum theory to a much broader audience of readers than is generally possible with this sort of material.
Part social history, part popular science as well as raising questions of a philosophical nature - this makes a cracking read and comes highly recommended.
Jenny Gardener
The personal touch November 11, 2008
Matthew Burns (Dover, England)
12 out of 18 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed reading this book!
Excellent, interesting, story and subject.
I thought Kumar put it across in a very entertaining way, I did not get all of the minutia of the physics but that did not matter, I especially
enjoyed the suspense and his sense of humour. I also enjoyed the way
the story wove characters and events together, all the way through I was kept interested, he knows how to tell a story.
I got alot out of the information in the book; it filled in gaps for me in my knowledge about the subject as well as providing a really interesting back drop to the stuff I'd done at school. (I liked science till I got to the 6th Form.) The book worked on many different levels, as a history I became aware that there were quite often unintended results or consequences from experiments or ideas, some times others taking up
something someone else had accidently stumbled across and looking at it in a new way, I liked that, I found it thought provoking.
This gave me an interesting insight in to the whole unfolding
understanding of the science as it happened in time, this was one of the main areas focused on. Another aspect, the personalities
and how they interacted what they got up to I enjoyed hearing about
their interests and how they lived. 'Painting a picture' of the
scientists as people really worked for me.
Bringing quantum theory to life December 1, 2008
Martin Lee
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a quite marvellous book. There must be loads of people, like me, that are daunted by the complexity of quantum theory, and yet feel like it's something they ought to try and get their heads round.
There have been no end of books that have given a tantalising snapshot of what it means for the layman, but never so comprehensively done. Manjit Kumar does a great job of weaving together the science, the history and the human drama of it all, to create a book that, by the standards of most science books, can only be described as a page turner.
At the heart of the book is the decades long rivalry between Einstein and Bohr, and although that rivalry provides a central structure, there is generous space for the contribution and role of all the other main players in the development of quantum theory through the first part of the twentieth century, starting with Max Planck's discovery of the quantum.
It's hard to recommend this book too highly. Anyone who has read and enjoyed popular science books over the years is almost sure to find that Quantum fills many gaps in their knowledge and links together the historical narrative in a fresh and vivid way.
 Bookbag.co.uk November 7, 2008
Magda Healey (UK)
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
Quantum is a fascinating, powerful and brilliantly written book that shows one of the most important theories of modern science in the making and discusses its implications for our ideas about the fundamental nature of the world and human knowledge, while presenting intimate and insightful portraits of people who made the science. Highly recommended.
Magda Healey writing for the Bookbag.co.uk
The entanglement of classical and quantum realities December 11, 2008
Rama Rao (Morgantown, WV USA)
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
The great Einstein-Bohr debate about physical reality is interesting not only to physicists, but also to great many readers interested in understanding the nature. This discussion between Bohr and Einstein over the interpretation of quantum theory began in 1927 at the fifth Solvay Conference. The debate over the ability of quantum theory to describe nature was fueled by many leading physicists of the time, some of whom directly contributed to the development of quantum physics, but later found themselves arguing against the theory they helped to create. Notable examples include Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, and Max Planck; the latter two did not actively participate in challenging the quantum reality. Bohr and Einstein spent many years intensely debating the nature of reality, and their discussions are known for very famous Einstein's comments such as; "God does not play dice,' or "God is slick, but he ain't mean," and Bohr's response was "don't bring God into this (discussion of quantum physics)." Bohr argued vigorously against both deterministic and realistic world, but Einstein was equally adamant to defend these two physical and philosophical concepts. Deterministic philosophy was spurred by Newtonian mechanics; if we know a system and its physical properties (size, color, or position) at one point in time, then at some point in future we can predict the system based on these physical properties. Bohr argued that complete knowledge of the present can result only in a description of what the future most probably will be like, but there is no such thing as certainty in quantum world. This thought is mystified by what is commonly called Copenhagen interpretation, and its strong proponents were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Born. Classical reality envisioned by Einstein was supported to a certain level by Schroedinger. Recent historical research shows that Paul Dirac had his own doubts about Copenhagen school of thought (1), and Max Planck, the founding father of quantum physics, lived until 1947 did not participate directly in Einstein-Bohr debate because of his own insecurities about quantum reality. When experimental test for Bell's inequality was conducted by Alain Aspect and others, many thought that Einstein was definitely wrong, but recent advances say, not so fast. Physicist Roger Penrose and many others believe that quantum physics is an incomplete theory (2). Few weeks ago when Large Hadron Collider (LHC) conducted test runs, Stephen Hawking expressed pessimism of finding Higgs Boson in LHC experiments by stating that "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs." In a poll conducted in 1999 at Cambridge University, 55% of physicists polled for none of the existing quantum interpretations are right. This shows that not everything is settled in quantum physics.
History of quantum physics is the best example to understand how scientists work. Their collective efforts to understand the universe we live in through publications, conferences, discussions correspondence and collaborative efforts are essential to scientific advancement. The author describes these things well in the book, but he falls short in certain areas; his current work uses previously published works of Max Jammer (3), Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg (4) as his few sources of information, but he could have researched a little more by talking to people who were directly associated with Einstein or Bohr. In a recent book by Louisa Gilder (5), after interviewing a colleague of Boris Podolsky, she reported that Rosen or Podolsky never asked Einstein for his permission when they published the classic Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen paper, 'Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete." It is also stated elsewhere that Einstein never thought this was going to be a paper; the ideas came out during informal discussions (6). The author discusses the results of crucial experiments such as tests of Bell's theorem, and other work that may have lead to confusions or mistakes.
Many who are familiar with the history of quantum physics think that even though Einstein is unquestionably the best scientist mankind has ever seen but they also believe that he was grumpy old man who did not appreciate new and novel ideas in physics. This is certainly not true according to physicists who knew him. He helped Max Planck in the development of early ideas such as quantized energy levels in quantum physics. Einstein was not against new ideas such as the probabilistic or statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, but the denial of an independent reality bothered him immensely. This lead to another famous quote from Einstein: "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it." The author resurrects these ideals of Einstein hastily when he discusses experimental tests of Bell's theorem. He concludes that Einstein's doubts about the completeness of quantum mechanics are vindicated.
1. Alisa Bokulich, Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate. Perspectives on Science 2008, vol. 16, no. 1, pages 103-114.
2. Spirituality and the Nature of Reality - A discussion between Roger Penrose and T. D. Singh, Published by Bhaktivedanta Institute, 2007 (ISBN: 8190136976)
3. The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics
4. The Conceptual Completion and the Extensions of Quantum Mechanics 1932-1941: Epilogue, Aspects of the Further Development of Quantum Theory 1942-1999: ... (Historical Development of Quantum Theory)
5. The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn
6. Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries Tag: Author of in Search of Schrod. Cat
7. Einstein, Bohr and the Quantum Dilemma: From Quantum Theory to Quantum Information
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