Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
Page 1
Praise for Quantum
‘An exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars. The explanations of science and philosophical interpretation are pitched with an ideal clarity for the general reader [and] perhaps most interestingly, although the author is admirably even-handed, it is difficult not to think of Quantum, by the end, as a resounding rehabilitation of Albert Einstein.’
Steven Poole, Guardian
‘The reason this book is, in fact, so readable is because it contains vivid portraits of the scientists involved, and their contexts…This is about gob-smacking science at the far end of reason…Take it nice and easy and savour the experience of your mind being blown without recourse to hallucinogens.’
Nicholas Lezard, Paperback Choice of the Week, Guardian
‘Kumar is an accomplished writer who knows how to separate the excitement of the chase from the sometimes impenetrable mathematics. In Quantum he tells the story of the conflict between two of the most powerful intellects of their day: the hugely famous Einstein and the less well-known but just as brilliant Dane, Niels Bohr.’
Financial Times
‘Manjit Kumar’s Quantum is a super-collider of a book, shaking together an exotic cocktail of free-thinking physicists, tracing their chaotic interactions and seeing what God-particles and black holes fly up out of the maelstrom. He provides probably the most lucid and detailed intellectual history ever written of a body of theory that makes other scientific revolutions look limp-wristed by comparison.’
Independent
‘Quantum by Manjit Kumar is so well written that I now feel I’ve more or less got particle physics sussed. Quantum transcends genre – it is historical, scientific, biographical, philosophical.’
Readers’ Books of the Year, Guardian
‘Highly readable…A welcome addition to the popular history of twentieth-century physics.’
Nature
‘An elegantly written and accessible guide to quantum physics, in which Kumar structures the narrative history around the clash between Einstein and Bohr, and the anxiety that quantum theory “disproved the existence of reality”.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘It would be a rare author who could fully address both the philosophical and the historical issues – an even rarer one who could make it all palatable and entertaining to a general audience. If Kumar scores less than full marks it is only because of the admirably ambitious scale of his book.’
Andrew Crumey, Daily Telegraph
‘Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar is one of the best guides yet to the central conundrums of modern physics.’
John Banville, Books of the Year, The Age , Australia
‘By combining personalities and physics – both of an intriguingly quirky nature–Kumar transforms the sub-atomic debate between Einstein, Niels Bohr and others in their respective circles into an absorbing and…comprehensible narrative.’
Independent
‘In this magisterial study of the issue, Manjit Kumar probes beyond the froth and arcane arguments and reveals what really lies behind the theory and ultimately what it means for the development of science…Here we have an erudite work that takes the debate into new territory.’
Good Book Guide
‘Quantum is a fascinating, powerful and brilliantly written book that shows one of the most important theories of modern science in the making and discusses its implications for our ideas about the fundamental nature of the world and human knowledge, while presenting intimate and insightful portraits of people who made the science. Highly recommended.’
thebookbag.co.uk
‘This is the biography of an idea and as such reads much like a thriller.’
Ham & High
‘It is a revolution that, even if most people don’t fully realise yet, has changed the face of science – and of our understanding of the nature of reality – for ever. Beautifully written in a tour de force that covers the fierce debate about the foundations of reality that gripped the scientific community through the 20th century, this book also looks at the personal collision of thinking and belief between two of quantum theory’s great men, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr…This is the world of Alice down the cosmic rabbit hole. Take a peek.’
Odyssey , South Africa
‘Kumar brings us through the detail of the various advances, confusions and mistakes, and what emerges clearly is a picture of how science works as a great international collective effort.’
Irish Times
‘The virtue of Kumar’s book is that it takes us deeper than many and in doing so gives an insight into what we don’t know.’
spiked-online.com
‘A dramatic, powerful and superbly written history.’
Publishing News
‘A fresh perspective on the debate.’
Press Association
‘The most important popular science book published this year.’
Bookseller
‘A quite marvellous book…Manjit Kumar does a great job of weaving together the science, the history and the human drama of it all, to create a book that, by the standards of most science books, can only be described as a page turner…It’s hard to recommend this book too highly.’
top10.supersoftcafe.com
‘A superbly written history of the 20th century’s most challenging scientific revolution ’.
Independent Bookseller’s Association Christmas Books Catalogue
‘Rich and intensively researched…this qualitative, narrative method is a great way to get your head around the most extraordinary and intellectually demanding theory ever devised. Kumar brings to life the wide spectrum of personalities involved in the development of the quantum theory, from the quiet and thoughtful Bohr, to the lively womanising Schrödinger…I had difficulty putting this book down.’
Astronomy Now
‘Accessible to the non-scientist…Quantum is a fine book in many ways.’
Socialism Today , April 2009
MANJIT KUMAR
QUANTUM
EINSTEIN, BOHR
AND THE GREAT DEBATE ABOUT
THE NATURE OF REALITY
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
Copyright © 2008 by Manjit Kumar
First American Edition 2010
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kumar, Manjit.
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the great debate about the nature
of reality / Manjit Kumar.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07829-9
1. Quantum theory—History—Popular works. I. Title.
QC173.98.K86 2009
530.12—dc22
2009051249
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For
Lahmber Ram and Gurmit Kaur
Pandora, Ravinder, and Jasvinder
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I: THE QUANTUM
Chapter 2 The Patent Slave
Chapter 3 The Golden Dane
Chapter 4 The Quantum Atom
Chapter 5 When Einstein Met Bohr
Chapter 6 The Prince of Duality
PART II: BOY PHYSICS
Chapter 7 Spin Doctors
Chapter 8 The Quantum Magician
Chapter 9 ‘A Late Erotic Outburst’
Chapter 10 Uncertainty in Copenhagen
PART III: TITANS CLASH OVER REALITY
Chapter 11 Solvay 1927
Chapter 12 Einstein Forgets Relativity
Chapter 13 Quantum Reality
PART IV: DOES GOD PLAY DICE?
Chapter 14 For Whom Bell’s Theorem Tolls
Chapter 15 The Quantum Demon
Timeline
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Prologue
THE MEETING OF MINDS
Paul Ehrenfest was in tears. He had made his decision. Soon he would attend the week-long gathering where many of those responsible for the quantum revolution would try to understand the meaning of what they had wrought. There he would have to tell his old friend Albert Einstein that he had chosen to side with Niels Bohr. Ehrenfest, the 34-year-old Austrian professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in Holland, was convinced that the atomic realm was as strange and ethereal as Bohr argued.1
In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.’2 ‘I laugh only at their naiveté,’ Einstein replied.3 ‘Who knows who would have the [last] laugh in a few years?’ For him it was no laughing matter, for at stake was the very nature of reality and the soul of physics.
The photograph of those gathered at the fifth Solvay conference on ‘Electrons and Photons’, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927, encapsulates the story of the most dramatic period in the history of physics. With seventeen of the 29 invited eventually earning a Nobel Prize, the conference was one of the most spectacular meetings of minds ever held.4 It marked the end of a golden age of physics, an era of scientific creativity unparalleled since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century led by Galileo and Newton.
Paul Ehrenfest is standing, slightly hunched forward, in the back row, third from the left. There are nine seated in the front row. Eight men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert Einstein. Looking straight ahead, gripping the chair with his right hand, he seems ill at ease. Is it the winged collar and tie that are causing him discomfort, or what he has heard during the preceding week? At the end of the second row, on the right, is Niels Bohr, looking relaxed with a half-whimsical smile. It had been a good conference for him. Nevertheless, Bohr would be returning to Denmark disappointed that he had failed to convince Einstein to adopt his ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of what quantum mechanics revealed about the nature of reality.
Instead of yielding, Einstein had spent the week attempting to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent, that Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation was flawed. Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.5
It was Max Planck, sitting on Marie Curie’s right, holding his hat and cigar, who discovered the quantum. In 1900 he was forced to accept that the energy of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation could only be emitted or absorbed by matter in bits, bundled up in various sizes. ‘quantum’ was the name Planck gave to an individual packet of energy, with ‘quanta’ being the plural. The quantum of energy was a radical break with the long-established idea that energy was emitted or absorbed continuously, like water flowing from a tap. In the everyday world of the macroscopic where the physics of Newton ruled supreme, water could drip from a tap, but energy was not exchanged in droplets of varying size. However, the atomic and subatomic level of reality was the domain of the quantum.
In time it was discovered that the energy of an electron inside an atom was ‘quantised’ it could possess only certain amounts of energy and not others. The same was true of other physical properties, as the microscopic realm was found to be lumpy and discontinuous and not some shrunken version of the large-scale world that humans inhabit, where physical properties vary smoothly and continuously, where going from A to C means passing through B. quantum physics, however, revealed that an electron in an atom can be in one place, and then, as if by magic, reappear in another without ever being anywhere in between, by emitting or absorbing a quantum of energy. This was a phenomenon beyond the ken of classical, non-quantum physics. It was as bizarre as an object mysteriously disappearing in London and an instant later suddenly reappearing in Paris, New York or Moscow.
By the early 1920s it had long been apparent that the advance of quantum physics on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis had left it without solid foundations or a logical structure. Out of this state of confusion and crisis emerged a bold new theory known as quantum mechanics. The picture of the atom as a tiny solar system with electrons orbiting a nucleus, still taught in schools today, was abandoned and replaced with an atom that was impossible to visualise. Then, in 1927, Werner Heisenberg made a discovery that was so at odds with common sense that even he, the German wunderkind of quantum mechanics, initially struggled to grasp its significance. The uncertainty principle said that if you want to know the exact velocity of a particle, then you cannot know its exact location, and vice versa.
No one knew how to interpret the equations of quantum mechanics, what the theory was saying about the nature of reality at the quantum level. Questions about cause and effect, or whether the moon exists when no one is looking at it, had been the preserve of philosophers since the time of Plato and Aristotle, but after the emergence of quantum mechanics they were being discussed by the twentieth century’s greatest physicists.
With all the basic components of quantum physics in place, the fifth Solvay conference opened a new chapter in the story of the quantum. For the debate that the conference sparked between Einstein and Bohr raised issues that continue to preoccupy many eminent physicists and philosophers to this day: what is the nature of reality, and what kind of description of reality should be regarded as meaningful? ‘No more profound intellectual debate has ever been conducted’, claimed the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. ‘It is a pity that the debate, because of its nature, can’t be common currency.’6
Of the two main protagonists, Einstein is a twentieth-century icon. He was once asked to stage his own three-week show at the London Palladium. Women fainted in his presence. Young girls mobbed him in Geneva. Today this sort of adulation is reserved for pop singers and movie stars. But in the aftermath of the First World War, Einstein became the first superstar of science when in 1919 the bending of light predicted by his theory of general relativity was confirmed. Little had changed when in January 1931, during a lecture tour of America, Einstein attended the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s movie City Limits in Los Angeles. A large crowd cheered wildly when they saw Chaplin and Einstein. ‘They cheer me because they all understand me,’ Chaplin told Einstein, ‘and they cheer you because no one understands you.’7
Whereas the name Einstein is a byword for scientific genius, Niels Bohr was, and remains, less well known. Yet to his contemporaries he was every inch the scientific giant. In 1923 Max Born, who played a pivotal part in the development of quantum mechanics, wrote that Bohr’s ‘influence on theoretical and experimental research of our time is greater than that of any other physicist’.8 Forty years l
ater, in 1963, Werner Heisenberg maintained that ‘Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein’.9
When Einstein and Bohr first met in Berlin in 1920, each found an intellectual sparring partner who would, without bitterness or rancour, push and prod the other into refining and sharpening his thinking about the quantum. It is through them and some of those gathered at Solvay 1927 that we capture the pioneering years of quantum physics. ‘It was a heroic time’, recalled the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who was a student in the 1920s.10 ‘It was a period of patient work in the laboratory, of crucial experiments and daring action, of many false starts and many untenable conjectures. It was a time of earnest correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criticism and brilliant mathematical improvisation. For those who participated it was a time of creation.’ But for Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb: ‘There was terror as well as exaltation in their new insight.’
Without the quantum, the world we live in would be very different. Yet for most of the twentieth century, physicists accepted that quantum mechanics denied the existence of a reality beyond what was measured in their experiments. It was a state of affairs that led the American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to describe quantum mechanics as ‘that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands but which we know how to use’.11 And use it we have. Quantum mechanics drives and shapes the modern world by making possible everything from computers to washing machines, from mobile phones to nuclear weapons.