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The Quantum Story
- A History in 40 Moments
- Narrated by: Mike Pollock
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
Utterly beautiful. Profoundly disconcerting. Quantum theory is quite simply the most successful account of the physical universe ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the 21st-century technology that we now take for granted. But at the same time it has completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at its most fundamental level. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it.
The Quantum Story begins in 1900, tracing a century of game-changing science. Popular science writer Jim Baggott first shows how, over the space of three decades, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others formulated and refined the theory--and opened the floodgates. Indeed, since then, a torrent of ideas has flowed from the world's leading physicists, as they explore and apply the theory's bizarre implications. To take us from the story's beginning to the present day, Baggott organizes his narrative around 40 turning-point moments of discovery. Many of these are inextricably bound up with the characters involved--their rivalries and their collaborations, their arguments and, not least, their excitement as they sense that they are redefining what reality means. Through the mix of story and science, we experience their breathtaking leaps of theory and experiment, as they uncover such undreamed of and mind-boggling phenomenon as black holes, multiple universes, quantum entanglement, the Higgs boson, and much more.
Brisk, clear, and compelling, The Quantum Story is science writing at its best. A compelling look at the 100-year history of quantum theory, it illuminates the idea as it reveals how generations of physicists have grappled with this monster ever since.
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What listeners say about The Quantum Story
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Troy
- 08-21-11
Not the Disappearing Spoon
Once you have read the Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean this book is difficult to sit through. It does flow well but lacks the lyrical smoothness of the spoon. Although, I liked it and did enjoy it, it was dense.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Gregory
- 08-20-11
Exploring the extremely small and extremely huge
Although, the title on one of the downloads is mislabeled as "40 Minutes" -- these "40 Moments" last for 15 1/2 hours in the audible format. That is a lot of listening for one credit, but worth the time if you have any interest in science, physics, space, or time. The author covers the struggles, over more than a century, to understand opposite ends of our "normal" perception of reality -- the extremely small and extremely huge -- the structure and physics of atoms and the universe. The book is well read, so you can ignore the formulas and still capture the major concepts, even if you are not a physicist. I would not have tackled this content in written form, but it was enjoyable in audio. [If you are a physicist, you might also want the hard-copy book for the references and all the formulas (which are not as simple as e = mc**2).] This book provided me an appreciation of how difficult it was (and still is) for the geniuses to figure this stuff out. I discovered that the science, which my high school and college professors often presented as "facts," ended up being "false", questionable, only one of strong competing theories or opinions, or an over-simplification of reality. However, the "final answer" is not included in the book, since it has yet to be discovered.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Abhi Mahule
- 08-12-11
Quantum mechanics time travel
Jim Baggot does an excellent job of the taking us on the journey of the quantum mechanics. Mike Pollock's narration is likable. Since its inception with the work of Max Planck right till the current ongoing work of Ed Witten on M-String theory, the entire spectrum is well chronicled.
You will get the glimpses of the what went on through the minds of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schroedinger as well as Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac. The idea of Neils Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is concretely explained. Albert Einstein's role in all this is nicely potrayed.
The rich additions to the standard model of physics was done by next generation of physicists such as Murray Gellman, Sheldon Glashow, Richard Feynman. The concepts of quarks, Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics is vividly explained through the thoughts of these great scientists.
The books ends with Stephen Hawking's black hole theory and the search project for the still elusive Higgs Boson - "the God particle"
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17 people found this helpful
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- John M.
- 12-14-11
For Physics majors only
This story could have been told in about an hour. It is not for the layman. I thought the history was interesting, but the incessant spewing of arcane physics formulae is Greek to me. I had had enough about half way through (too much, really) and quit listening out of sheer boredom.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-31-17
For insiders only
Any additional comments?
I am a scientist by trade, so the science in this book, while not in my field, was not an issue for me.
That said, this book is VERY detailed. It includes both a reasonable helping of scientific detail (probably more than the average reader would care for), and EXHAUSTIVE detail of the history and events in the evolution of quantum theory. While an insider might well find this level of exhaustive detail rewarding, it was far too much for me. I am guessing that if the very comprehensive detail included in this book was too much for me, it is likely to be too much for most other folks.
In all I think this book would appeal to a wider audience if it invested more time into the impact of quantum theory on other disciplines, and put far fewer pages into cataloging every step in the evolution of the field.
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- George Reid
- 10-05-11
A wonderful, enjoyable tale told thru its creators
The story of the development of science is always best told through the eyes of those who made the discoveries. Jim Baggott has done superb job of telling the subtle and demanding story of the development of quantum mechanics. Not only does he make accessible the concepts of quantum theory, but he brings to life the personalities who drove the work forward. One caveat, you really need a general science background to follow some of the concepts from the audio book format. There were a few times when I wished I could have stopped and replayed what I just herd.
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- Kevin Bushnell
- 06-07-19
The MOST excellent review of Quantum History
This is not just “another great book on the history of science” (and there are quite a few), but it is, in my opinion, THE best introduction to the last 120 years of physics and in particular theoretical, particle, and quantum physics.
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- Hendrick Mcdonald
- 08-28-15
Detailed but with a wide focus
I was pleasantly surprised by the wide focus of this book. It goes through most every important advance in quantum mechanics with the usual first thirty years, but then goes well beyond that into particle physics, some standard model, EPR, bells inequalities, entanglement, some interpretation theories, symmetry, string theory, and up to quantum loop gravity. It doesn't stay on any one topic too long, gives a bit of backstory then the thinking behind it. Really does an excellent job of balancing history with theory. Very well done and easy to listen to.
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- Dudley H. Williams
- 03-23-13
OF DICE AND MEN
“God doesn’t play dice”—Albert Einstein
I enjoyed the biographical aspects of this interesting book. Actually I had little choice. I could hardly fathom some arcane formulae, let alone audibly. But that’s no draw back. There’s the humanness of household name geniuses with adventures à la Greek gods, replete with destructive atomic bolt toys and tabloid fashion sexual escapades: Albert Einstein’s secret love child, Erwin Schrӧdinger’s “open marriage”, both spouses indulging in extra-marital affairs and his keeping notes of his promiscuity.
Einstein (Max Planck notwithstanding) effectively launched the quantum story. Starting with a high school temporary teaching post, he secured an appointment at Switzerland’s Bern Patent Office as a technical expert 3rd class. In 1905, his “Miraculous Year”, age 26, he published inter alia, papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect. He submitted one of these for a Doctoral thesis. His dissertation had initially been rejected—apparently for being too short. He added a single sentence, resubmitted and was awarded the Doctorate that same year. This year he also formulated his E=MC2 equation. In 1906 he was promoted to technical expert 2nd class.
Niel Bohr left Denmark for Cambridge In 1911 aged 25, worked in the laboratory of 1906 Noble Prize laureate J. J. Thompson. March 1912 he joined Rutherford’s team in Manchester, didn’t care much for experimental physics and devoted time to theoretical problems. He investigated the structure of atoms—the hydrogen atoms. In 1913 his theories appeared in “Philosophical Magazine”. He proposed a new quantum mechanics to replace the classical theory applied to the internal structure of the atom.
Luis De Broglie postulated that Einstein’s 1905 theory should be generalised by extending it to all material particles, especially electrons. This is known as Luis De Broglie’s dual wave particle hypothesis—relying on his knowledge of chamber music. His theory was dubbed La Comedie France .
Werner Heisenberg publishes his theory which spawned quantum mechanics. The term electron spin is coined, arguably first by Bohr. Wolfgang Pauli presents his exclusion principle in terms of which no electron in an atom can have the same set of 4 quantum numbers. In 1926 from Jan-June, Schrӧdinger produced a series of 6 papers—his “late erotic outburst in his life”— his theory of wave mechanics. This apparently laid the foundation for the theory of quantum mechanics.
In Copenhagen the interpretation of quantum theory is proposed—Max Born’s interpretation on the significance of Schrӧdinger’s wave functions. Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrӧdinger become involved in an intense debate on the reality of quantum jumps. Heisenberg uncertainty principle sees the light of day in 1927. Einstein becomes a stern tailspin critic of quantum theory.
Enter the Einstein-Bohr debates, with Einstein, attempting to discredit quantum physics with ingenious thought experiments, adding that “God doesn’t play dice”. Bohr, proved equal to Einstein’s genius, extricating himself from near chess mate entrapments with protean elusiveness. Schrӧdinger proposed arguably the most famous “Gedankenexperiment”, i.e., the “Cat Paradox”. Paul Dirac’s relativistic electron equation enters the fray. In 1935 Einstein, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky published a short paper seeking to refute quantum mechanics.
Post WWII a series of crisis meetings were held culminating in the development of quantum electro-dynamics (QED) by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson. 1954 the saw the development of quantum field theory, based on local gauge symmetry by Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills. In 1960 Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg developed an early version of a unified theory of the electro weak force and predicted the existence of heavy photons. In 1963 Murray Gell-Mann identified the ultimate units of matter as the particles he calls “quarks”. At this stage quantum physics become synonymous with the history of particle physics.
In 1968 there were ever larger and more expensive particle accelerators and colliders with the discovery at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLACK) that the proton possesses an internal structure. Feynmann discovered the hypothetical “charm quark”—protons being bombarded with beams of high-energy electrons, revealing “partons” i.e., hard, point-like charged particles appearing to move freely. GellMann shrugged off Feynmann’s “partons” as “put-ons”—“quaks”.
The 1964 John Bell formulated a mathematical theorem which applied to any hidden-variable theory inequality that satisfied (but which was not valid for) quantum mechanics. It exposed the true nature of Einstein’s challenges, providing a straightforward test of local versus non-local reality. The first experiments were performed by Alan Aspan and his colleagues in 1981 and 1982, showing that the quantum world was determinantly non-local.
Disastrously in 2008 CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, costing 5 billion pounds, all but blew up when switched on for the first time. Perhaps, since God doesn’t play dice, this incident might even have been a vis major (an act of God) as if to prove than Einstein had a point after all!
RELATED INSIGHTFUL AUDIBLE MATERIAL: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn—Louisa Gilder / Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science—David Lindley / American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer—Kai Bird , Martin J. Sherwin / A Brief History of Time—Stephen Hawking / Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction—John Polkinghorne / The Tao of Physics—Frijof Capra
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Rex
- 10-08-12
Update your Quantum knowledge
What did you love best about The Quantum Story?
It was able to get me up to date from high school physics to the current state of play. Jim Baggot did a wonderful job of providing very high brow physics in a way that made it make sense. I wanted an update: I got it in spades! I will read more of his books.
What other book might you compare The Quantum Story to and why?
none that I know of
What does Mike Pollock bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He has a good way of reading very difficult and thoughtful material that did not shut me off.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Finally understanding Schroedinger's Cat
Any additional comments?
A well written story of a complex concept that kept the reader along even if you started to lose some of the concepts.
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