Skip to main content

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. 

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

  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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more