Robert

Of all the audiobooks on the history of quantum mechanics available from audible.com, Kumar's QUANTUM is the most lucid, best written, chooses to emphasize the most significant events and puts them in the correct historical context and order in such a way that we can see their relevance to the theory of the quantum.

It is good to hear of Ettore Majorana. The over-breezingly, if not sloppily, written text disappoints. Maguielio seems to have "learned" much about Majorana by way of gossip and cafe table talk, so it's hard to know what's substantiated and what's not. One virtually gets the impression that although Majorana published virtually nothing his genius thought of "everything." It's good to have the history of nuclear physics, but it's disappointingly sketchy. It's generally well-known that Enrico Fermi was not the brightest/deepest, which Magueijo emphasizes _ad nauseum_. It's quite as if Magueijo wrote this book to correct the (false) impression we get of Italian physics from Fermi, by creating an Italian genius who Magueijo comes just short of saying outranked Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli... The breezy narrator brings out the faults of the book. I'm sure there's a good story there, but Magueijo didn't tell it.

Very poor sound quality, very muffled and barely distinct. (I've downloaded over a hundred audible.com books & have never had this complaint.) Too hard to listen to...too bad, because a Hill novel never disappoints.