The Quantum Story

A History in 40 Moments

De: Jim Baggott

Narrado por: Mike Pollock

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.

©2011 Jim Baggott (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.