A phenomenally well written, educational, captivating, easy to understand book about the science, history and politics of Quantum Physics.
This book requires no prior knowledge of anything related to physics. One could pick up this book not knowing who Einstein was, and gain a ton of value. One could also pick up this book after having to solve many problem sets involving Schrodinger Equations, and still gain a ton of value. The only audience who might not find this book interesting are those who study physics for a living and are most likely familiar with most of its contents.
I had always envisioned the physics community getting together for afternoon tea and sharing ideas in a welcome, collaborative and respective manner. Having read this book and watched the first season of the show Genius (covering Einstein’s life), I realized that it’s no more elegant than the geopolitical tensions occurring in the world today. There is a ton of haste, disloyalty, distrust, group-think and siding of opinion. My glorified perception of physicists was “let’s work together to reveal the secrets of the universe” turned into “your theory is shit and I’ll make sure you never get a job if you try to challenge my ideas again.”
The first half of the book maintains really good chronological order as the all of the big names (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Neumann, etc…) are discussed and the foundations of Quantum Mechanics are introduced. However, the only names that really stood out from the second half of the book are David Bohm, John Steward Bell and Hugh Everret. It was difficult to discern the timeline between the late 1960s through the early 2000s, and a lot of tangential names were interspersed throughout the late 20th century. There were a lot of details which were difficult to follow, but the big picture was still very coherent.
As an undergraduate Engineering Science student at UofT, I had to take many math and physics courses. Some of these physics courses include:
Classical Mechanics
Fluid Mechanics
Thermodynamics
Waves & Modern Physics
Molecules & Materials
Quantum & Thermal Physics
Semiconductors and electrical devices
There was a point when I was solving problems involving Schrodinger’s equation on a daily basis. However, I always accepted the Copenhagen interpretation as Gospel and it never crossed my mind to question it. None of my professors ever mentioned the EPR paper or any of at the alternative Quantum Mechanics interpretations. I presume that these would’ve come up if I had continued my studies in physics, but it still feels as if I was lied to. In addition, I felt that school was too saturated by numbers and equations, missing the beauty of the bigger picture and philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. This book has made me realize how important it is to study the history of science in addition to the science itself.
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Below are some of the interesting points that stood out to me.
Schrödinger’s cat
I’ve heard and discussed the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment many times. However, I never knew that the superposition of the cat’s liveness was dependent on whether or not a radioactive atom were to decay, which would trigger a vile of poison to break.
Niels Bohr
I recall studying Bohr diagrams in my high school chemistry and physics classes, but was never aware of his involvement in Quantum Physics. For all intents and purposes, Bohr is the grandfather of Quantum Physics. Given that he passed away in the 1960s, it’s amazing to consider how nascent this field is.
According to various people who worked with Bohr, he was supposedly a very poor writer, a very slow thinker and extremely bad at articulating his thoughts. When attending action films with his colleagues, he often had to ask what was going on because he couldn’t keep up with the pace of the film. I’m sure he would’ve failed today’s entrance exams into any University…
John von Neumman
I had always known that he was a key figure in the physics world, but was not aware of his child prodigy status. He taught himself calculus by the age of 8, knew at least 7 languages, acquired his first PhD by the age of 19, and that was just the beginning…
The book mentioned that some people referred to him as a Marian because of how extraordinary he was.
Copenhagen Interoperation
Bohr and Heisenberg came up with a lot of the foundational ideas of Quantum Mechanics in Copenhagen during the 1920s. They derived a wave function which describes the probabilistic nature of a wave-particle. Hesinberg’s uncertainty principle further added that if a particle-wave’s location is measured, it’s meaningless to speak of its momentum and vice versa. Most importantly, this was the first time the measurement paradox was introduced, whereby a measurement causes the wave function to collapse, which begs the question of what is allowed to make a measurement ? A human? A cat? A machine? An ant?
Max Borne, Neumman and several other physicists helped support and formalize the Copenhagen interoperation, but it was very loosely defined between the 1920s and 1950s until Heisenberg published his book.
A fun fact about Heisenberg is that he was the youngest tenured professor at the time. He was afraid Schrödinger was going to outpace because of how neck in neck both of them were.
Albert Einstein
The more I learn about Einstein, the more amazed I am by his character. In addition to his contributions to relativity and Quantum Mechanics, he also wrote about Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and much more. This is simply Amazing! Einstein discovered the existence of photons 20 years before anyone else believe him.
EPR paper
I did not delve into the full details of the EPR paper yet, but in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen showed that “spooky action at a distance” (now known as Quantum Entanglement) proved that the Copenhagen Interoperation is incomplete.
Solvay conference
The Solvay conference is one of the most popular physics conferences that are held every few years. During the 5th Solvay conference in 1927, 17 out of the 29 attendees went on or either already have won a Novel prize! What a gathering of brilliant minds…
World war 2
The war brought a harsh stop to the theoretical and philosophical discussions surrounding Quantum Physics. Instead, money and effort translated into more practical applications of Quantum Physics. Oppenheimer led the Manhattan project in the US. Heisenberg and his colleagues said they were researching a nuclear reactor in Germany, though in reality most of the effort was going into nuclear bomb research.
The pentagon was built, which was the largest building in the world at the time. There was such a large influx of cash into the ecosystem that the number of students attending postgraduate studies in physics skyrocketed.
David Bohm
Bohm had various contributions to physics and math, but his most famous contribution is the pilot-wave theory, also known as Bohemian Mechanics. This was the first example of the hidden variable theory. By introducing non locality, his theory solves the problems of wave-particle duality, wave function collapse and Schrodingers cat. In this theory, each particle “lives” on a pilot wave, which introduces deterministic behavior to Quantum Mechanics. I haven’t had time to delve into the details of how this really works…
Unfortunately, most of Bohm’s work was rejected throughout his life. He challenges the status quo, and paid the price… Due to his marxist involvements, he was exiled on several occasions. He lived in America, Brazil and Britain at various points through his life. This made it difficult from him to present and spread his work, which had already been shut down by most of the Copenhagen Interpretation supporters.
John Stewart Bell
Bell is famously known for iterating on the work of the famous EPR paper, as well as finding a mistake in one of Von Neumann’s proofs. Bell’s theorem proved the nonlocal nature of Quantum Physics, thereby proving the incompleteness of the Copenhagen Interpretation. This further supports the concept of “spooky action at a distance”.
Bell knew that his ideas were not widely accepted and he always looked out for other physicists. On several occasions, he would ask other physicist if they were tenured before they start researching his work so as not to risk tenure-ship in the future.
Hugh Everett
In 1957, Hugh Everett proposed an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation through the many worlds interpretation. This idea has been adopted by many science fiction films and implies that there is an infinite number of Universes covering all possible outcomes. This solves the Schrödinger’s cat paradox by claiming that there is one Universe where the cat lives and another where the cat dies.
A couple decades after Everett published his work, DeWitt published his work on quantum decoherence. Rather than having wave functions collapse, the wave function of a particle “merges” with its outer world. This, in a way, supports the many worlds interpretation.
Everett’s work was met with a lot of skepticism, and he never went back into academia after finishing his PhD. Instead, he started a company that consulted for the US government relating to war strategies making him quite wealthy.