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Quantum Drama - Jim Baggott and John Heilbron ***

On a first glance of the cover you might think that Jim Baggott and John Heilbron were brilliant Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein impersonators. In fact Baggott is an excellent popular science writer and Heilbron was an esteemed historian of science, both specialising in quantum physics. There's another way the cover is misleading - you might think this was an in-depth exploration of Bohr and Einstein's relationship. The topics they argued about certainly come into it, but instead this is detailed look at how quantum theory developed.

I've read a lot of books on quantum physics, but I've never come across one that goes into such painstaking detail of every step along the way, introducing the work of a good number of physicists who rarely make it into the public eye. These range from John von Neumann - well known but usually sidelined as a quantum physicist - to the likes of Oskar Klein and Hans Kramers. Similarly, Baggott and Heilbron go into many (many) steps along the way that rarely get mentioned. And even when we're dealing with something mainstream like the uncertainty principle or Schrödinger's equation, the approach is very different from the one we usually see in a popular science title, because we are told what was thought at the time, rather than seeing the development through the prism of a modern understanding.

So far so good. But there are two problems with this book if it's seen as a title for a general audience. Firstly, there is hardly any engagement with the protagonists. Yes we get names - lots of names. But there is very little context or exploration of them as people. The focus is very much on their scientific (and philosophical) theorising. Of itself, this isn't too bad, but the other problem is that the writing is very dry. It's ironic that at one point the authors reference Lewis Carroll (oddly, in a book that is very precise, they totally mess up the title: instead of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' it's referenced as 'Alice in wonderland'). Before coming across this, I was genuinely reminded by the writing style of the scene in Alice where there's an attempt by a mouse to get characters dry by reading a very dull (dry) history passage. Quantum Drama sometimes has a similar feel to that parody passage.

Apart from occasional inexplicable bursts into CAPITALS, this feels like an academic history book with obscure scientific details thrown in. If the warning Stephen Hawking was given that every equation halves the numbers of readers, I'd probably be the only one. Admittedly the only mathematical workings tend to be simple algebra, but there's an awful lot of equations in places. And the explanation of the science lacks any approachability. I did honestly wonder if the academic Heilbron wrote most of the book before his death and Baggott just finished it off.

I think it's a brilliant book for historians of science, or for physicists from undergraduate level to professors who want to find out more about how quantum theory got to where it is. For the general reader, though, this really doesn't work. 

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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  1. Dennis Y31 May 2024 at 22:51

    Brian, thanks for the warning / challenge. It will take me until the end of time, or at least until the end of this Summer, to absorb Brian Greene's existential take on our universe. Quantum Drama sounds like the codex Librium that I'll need to wind down.

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