Reddit reviews Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
We found 7 Reddit comments about Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Hawking's On The Shoulders of Giants
Gribbin's The Scientists
Smithsonian's Timelines of Science
There are also a ton of good historical books on almost every major milestone in physics - a few I enjoyed:
The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electric Field by Nancy Forbes
E=MC2 by David Bodanis
Quantum by Manjit Kumar
The Big Bang by Simon Singh
I can't link you to any histories of biology or chemistry, sorry, those aren't my areas of knowledge.
My Recommendations:
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
Brian Greene Has Three Wonderful Books
The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone
The first one, is mostly history with a fair bit of Quantum/Particle physics.
Brian Greene covers topics from cosmology, quantum physics, and he is also a string theorist so he touches upon that.
The Quantum World is a more detailed introduction to quantum physics.
Perhaps "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar would be helpful. It goes over Bohr the scientist as well the legacy of Einsten, Planck, and others.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Einstein-Debate-Nature-Reality/dp/0393339882
Some things to remember though: Bohr helped start the quantum revolution, but his science is often considered the "old quantum". Yes, he was to first to state that electrons orbit atomic nuclei, but the current model of the atom is the Schrodinger model, which states that there is a "probability cloud" where the electron is most likely to be found around the atom. So the best advice I can give you before looking more into Bohr the Scientist is to see modern scientists standing on Bohr's shoulders rather than Bohr as the Atlas of modern quantum theory.
I've just finished The Windup Girl, which I had been putting off for some time. It was, quite simply, the most astounding and breath-taking science fiction book I've ever read. I loved it.
However, my problem is that I buy books compulsively. Mostly hard copies, but recently I bought a Kindle and buy the odd e-book or two. I have literally hundreds of books on my "to read" list.
One near the top is A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I recently read her phenomenal Wolf Hall and was blown away by her skills as a story teller. I'm a bit of an armchair historian, and I'm particularly interested in the French Revolution (amongst other things), so I'm very excited by the prospects this book holds. If it's anything like Wolf Hall then I'm in for a very particular treat.
Also near the top lies Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar's much lauded recent history of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I very much enjoyed other tangentially related books on this topic, including the wonderful The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Fly in the Cathedral, so this should be good fun and educational to boot.
Having read and loved Everitt's biography of Cicero, I'm very much looking forward to his biographies of Augustus and Hadrian.
I'm listening to an audio-book version of The Count of Monte Cristo on my iPod, which I find rather enjoyable. I've only got through the first half dozen chapters and it's already taken a few hours, so this looks to be a nice, long-term and periodic treat for when I have time alone in the car.
Cronin's The Passage keeps piquing my interest, but I was foolish enough to buy it in that lamentable format, the much cursed "trade paperback", so the thing is a behemoth. The size puts me off. I wish I had waited for a regular paper-back edition. As it is, it sits there on my bookshelf, flanked by the collected works of Alan Furst (what a wonderfully evocative writer of WWII espionage!!) and a bunch of much recommended, but as yet unread, fantasy including The Darkness that Comes Before by Bakker, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss and Physiognomy by Ford.
Books I have ordered and am eagerly awaiting, and which shall go straight to the top of the TBR list (no doubt to be replaced by next month's purchases) include Orlando Figes's highly regarded history of The Crimean War, Rosen's history of steam The Most Powerful Idea in the World and Stacy Schiff's contentious biography of Cleopatra.
A bit of a mixed bunch, all up, I'd say.
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
HUGE fan of this one. What it offers instead of many other books is it takes a historical approach to the story, which to me makes the subject significantly more interesting. He starts at Planck, describing his whole life by piecing together historical information, and does the same with every other physicist mentioned. With time, you have a full picture of each character and their life of debating each other on these topics. I really loved how he'd give a very full description of how a discovery happened, for example Heisenberg taking a very late night walk when he thought of the idea of the Uncertainty Principal. Kumar manages to keep the lead-up to each breakthrough very suspenseful by describing the state of physics at the time and the pressure each physicist was under. Later, after the famous debates we are presented with World War II and how each of the major players lived their lives throughout the war (Heisenberg worked on atomic weapon research for the axis, while Bohr was shipped to America to work on the Manhattan Project, and before the war they were both best friends). In the end you'll have a deep historical knowledge of these physicists, while having a good beginner understanding of the theories. I'm not a big reader, but I found myself glued to the book, extremely interested in what will happen next.
I remember getting a few good laughs in as well, while reading it.
For example, during the Solvay convention Einstein temporarily outsmarted Bohr with a surprise thought experiment, and in this picture we can really see the personality of each of them. (Look at Einstein's smug face)
May I suggest this book?
Quantum by Manjit Kumar here hope that's ok...
It's a fascinating retelling of the history of GR/QM and all of the people who were involved, with deep but very understandable descriptions of the science as the theories grew with the observations.
1.Quantum by Manjit Kumar
2.Id recommend things like 1984 and Brave New World, I also like Twain, Steinbeck and Hemingway.