Quantum Legacies

4.45 (22 ratings by Goodreads)
Regular price €19.99
Regular price €21.99 Sale Sale price €19.99
10-20
A01=David Kaiser
A23=Alan Lightman
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
albert einstein
astronomy
astrophysics
Author_David Kaiser
automatic-update
biography
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=PDX
Category=PHQ
Category=PHVB
cold war
competition
COP=United States
cosmology
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
discovery
double agent
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
exile
heisenberg
history
innovation
Language_English
matter
natural world
nature
nonfiction
PA=Available
particles
physics
politics
Price_€20 to €50
probability
profile
PS=Active
quantum theory
rivalry
schrodinger
science
scientists
softlaunch
soviet
space
spy
stephen hawking
technology
time
uncertainty
universe

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226819990
  • Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 16 Jun 2022
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

A series of engaging essays that explore iconic moments of discovery and debate in physicists' ongoing quest to understand the quantum world. The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism, cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age. In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists' still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays, Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great minds of the era-Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature-as they have tried to make sense of a messy world. Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own, researchers' ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that might reach beyond a given researcher's limited view. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to forge some shared understanding between individuals and across generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between scientific exploration and the human condition.
David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, and is coeditor of Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture, also published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has appeared in the New York Times and New Yorker and he is a frequent guest on NPR and in PBS NOVA documentaries.