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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more