by Manjit Kumar
Levenson, Thomas (2003), Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam Dell)
Levi, Hilde (1985), George de Hevesy: Life and Work (Bristol: Adam Hilger Ltd)
Lindley, David (2001), Boltzmann’s Atom: The Great Debate That Launched a Revolution in Physics (New York: The Free Press)
MacKinnon, Edward M. (1982), Scientific Explanation and Atomic Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Magris, Claudio (2001), Danube (London: The Harvill Press)
Mahon, Basil (2003), The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (Chichester: John Wiley)
Marage, Pierre and Grégoire Wallenborn (eds) (1999), The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics (Basel: Birkhäuser)
Marsden, Ernest (1948), ‘Rutherford Memorial Lecture’, in Rutherford (1954)
Maxwell, James Clerk (1860), ‘Illustrations of the Dynamical Theory of Gases’, Philosophical Magazine, 19, 19–32. Reprinted in Niven (1952)
Mehra, Jagdish (1975), The Solvay Conferences on Physics: Aspects of the Development of Physics since 1911 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (1982), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 1, Parts 1 and 2: The quantum Theory of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Sommerfeld: Its Foundations and the Rise of Its Difficulties 1900–1925 (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (1982), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 2: The Discovery of quantum Mechanics (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (1982), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 3: The Formulation of Matrix Mechanics and Its Modifications 1925–1926 (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (1982), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 4: The Fundamental Equations of quantum Mechanics 1925–1926 and The Reception of the New quantum Mechanics 1925–1926 (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (1987), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 5, Parts 1 and 2: Erwin Schrödinger and the Rise of Wave Mechanics (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (2000), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 6, Part 1: The Completion of quantum Mechanics 1926–1941 (Berlin: Springer)
Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg (2001), The Historical Development of quantum Theory, Vol. 6, Part 2: The Completion of quantum Mechanics 1926–1941 (Berlin: Springer)
Mendelssohn, Kurt (1973), The World of Walther Nernst: The Rise and Fall of German Science (London: Macmillan)
Metzger, Rainer (2007), Berlin in the Twenties: Art and Culture 1918–1933 (London: Thames and Hudson)
Meyenn, Karl von and Engelbert Schucking (2001), ‘Wolfgang Pauli’, Physics Today, February, 43–48
Millikan, Robert A. (1915), ‘New tests of Einstein’s photoelectric equation’, Physical Review, 6, 55
Moore, Ruth (1966), Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science, and The World They Changed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf)
Moore, Walter (1989), Schrödinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Mulligan, Joseph F. (1994), ‘Max Planck and the “black year” of German Physics’, American Journal of Physics, 62, 12, 1089–1097
Mulligan, Joseph F. (1999), ‘Heinrich Hertz and Philipp Lenard: Two Distinguished Physicists, Two Disparate Men’, Physics in Perspective, 1, 345–366
Mulvey, J. H. (ed.) (1981), The Nature of Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Murdoch, Dugald (1987), Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Nathan, Otto and Heinz Norden (eds) (1960), Einstein on Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster)
Neumann, John von (1955), Mathematical Foundations of quantum Mechanics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Nielsen, J. Rud (1963), ‘Memories of Niels Bohr’, Physics Today, October
Nitske, W. Robert (1971), The Life of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: Discoverer of the X-Ray (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press)
Niven, W. D. (ed.) (1952), The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols (New York: Dover Publications)
Nobel Lectures (1964), Physics 1942–1962 (Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Nobel Lectures (1965), Physics 1922–1941 (Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Nobel Lectures (1967), Physics 1901–1921 (Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Norris, Christopher (2000), quantum Theory and the Flight from Reason: Philosophical Responses to quantum Mechanics (London: Routledge)
Nye, Mary Jo (1996), Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics 1800–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
Offer, Avner (1991), The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Omnès, Roland (1999), quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Overbye, Dennis (2001), Einstein in Love (London: Bloomsbury)
Ozment, Steven (2005), A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, 100 BC to the 21st Century (London: Granta Books)
Pais, Abraham (1967), ‘Reminiscences of the Post-War Years’, in Rozental (1967)
Pais, Abraham (1982), ‘Subtle is the Lord…’: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Pais, Abraham (1986), Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Pais, Abraham (1989a), ‘Physics in the Making in Bohr’s Copenhagen’, in Sarlemijn and Sparnaay (1989)
Pais, Abraham (1989b), ‘George Uhlenbeck and the Discovery of Electron Spin’, Physics Today, December. Reprinted in Phillips (1992)
Pais, Abraham (1991), Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Pais, Abraham (1994), Einstein Lived Here (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Pais, Abraham (2000), The Genius of Science: A portrait gallery of twentieth-century physicists (New York: Oxford University Press)
Pais, Abraham (2006), J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Park, David (1997), The Fire Within The Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Pauli, Wolfgang (1946a), ‘Remarks on the History of the Exclusion Principle’, Science, 103, 213–215
Pauli, Wolfang (1946b), ‘Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics’, Nobel lecture delivered on 13 December. Reprinted in Nobel Lectures (1964), 27–43
Penrose, Roger (1990), The Emperor’s New Mind (London: Vintage)
Penrose, Roger (1995), Shadows of the Mind (London: Vintage)
Penrose, Roger (1997), The large, the small and the human mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Petersen, Aage (1985), ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr’, in French and Kennedy (1985)
Petruccioli, Sandro (1993), Atoms, Metaphors and Paradoxes: Niels Bohr and the construction of a new physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Phillips, Melba Newell (ed.) (1985), Physics History from AAPT Journals (College Park, MD: American Association of Physics Teachers)
Phillips, Melba (ed.) (1992), The Life and Times of Modern Physics: History of Physics II (New York: American Institute of Physics)
Planck, Max (1900a), ‘On An Improvement of Wien’s Equation for the Spectrum’, reprinted in Haar (1967)
Planck, Max (1900b), ‘On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum’, reprinted in Haar (1967)
Planck, Max (1949), Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York: Philosophical Library)
Planck, Max (1993), A Survey of Physical Theory (New York: Dover Publications)
Ponte, M.J.H. (1981), ‘Louis de Broglie’, in Goodman (1981)
Powers, Jonathan (1985), Philosophy and the New Physics (London: Methuen)
Przibram, Karl (ed.) (1967), Letters on Wave Mechanics, translation and introduction by Martin Klein (New York: Philosophical Library)
; Purrington, Robert D. (1997), Physics in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press)
Redhead, Michael (1987), Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Rhodes, Richard (1986), The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster)
Robertson, Peter (1979), The Early Years: The Niels Bohr Institute 1921–1930 (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag)
Robinson, Andrew (2006), The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Pi Press)
Rosenkranz, Ze’ev (2002), The Einstein Scrapbook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press)
Rowland, John (1938), Understanding the Atom (London: Gollancz)
Rosenfeld, Léon (1967), ‘Niels Bohr in the Thirties. Consolidation and extension of the Conception of Complementarity’, in Rozental (1967)
Rosenfeld, Léon (1968), ‘Some Concluding Remarks and Reminiscences’, in Solvay Institute (1968)
Rosenfeld, Léon and Erik Rüdinger (1967), ‘The Decisive Years: 1911–1918’, in Rozental (1967)
Rosenthal-Schneider, Ilse (1980), Reality and Scientific Truth: Discussions with Einstein, von Laue, and Planck, edited by Thomas Braun (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press)
Rozental, Stefan (ed.) (1967), Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as seen by his Friends and Colleagues (Amsterdam: North-Holland)
Rozental, Stefan (1998), Niels Bohr: Memoirs of a Working Relationship (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers)
Ruhla, Charles (1992), The Physics of Chance: From Blaise Pascal to Niels Bohr (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Rutherford, Ernest (1906), Radioactive Transformations (London: Constable)
Rutherford, Ernest (1911a), ‘The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom’, Philosophical Magazine, 21, 669–688. Reprinted in Boorse and Motz (1966), Vol. 1
Rutherford, Ernest (1911b), ‘Conference on the Theory of Radiation’, Nature, 88, 82–83
Rutherford, Ernest (1954), Rutherford By Those Who Knew Him. Being the Collection of the First Five Rutherford Lectures of the Physical Society (London: The Physical Society)
Rutherford, Ernest and Hans Geiger (1908a), ‘An Electrical Method for Counting the Number of Alpha Particles from Radioactive Substances’, The Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 81, 141–161
Rutherford, Ernest and Hans Geiger (1908b), ‘The Charge and Nature of the Alpha Particle’, The Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 81, 162–173
Sarlemijn, A. and M.J. Sparnaay (eds) (1989), Physics in the Making (Amsterdam: Elsevier)
Schilpp, Paul A. (ed.) (1969), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (New York: MJF Books). Collection first published in 1949 as Vol. VII in the series The Library of Living Philosophers by Open Court, La Salle, IL
Schrödinger, Erwin (1933), ‘The fundamental idea of wave mechanics’, Nobel lecture delivered on 12 December. Reprinted in Nobel Lectures (1965), 305–316
Schrödinger, Erwin (1935), ‘The Present Situation in quantum Mechanics’, reprinted and translated in Wheeler and Zurek (1983), 152–167
Schweber, Silvan S. (1994), QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Segrè, Emilio (1980), From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company)
Segrè, Emilio (1984), From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company)
Sime, Ruth Lewin (1996), Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press)
Smith, Alice Kimball and Charles Weiner (eds) (1980), Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
Snow, C. P. (1969), Variety of Men: Statesmen, Scientists, Writers (London: Penguin)
Snow, C. P. (1981), The Physicists (London: Macmillan)
Soddy, Frederick (1913), ‘Intra-Atomic Charge’, Nature, 92, 399–400
Solvay Institute (1968), Fundamental Problems in Elementary Particle Physics: proceedings of the 14th Solvay Council held in Brussels in 1967 (New York: Wiley Interscience)
Stachel, John (ed.) (1998), Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Stachel, John (2002), Einstein from ‘B to Z’ (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser)
Stapp, Henry P. (1977), ‘Are superluminal connections necessary?’, Il Nuovo Cimento, 40B, 191–205
Stürmer, Michael (1999), The German Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)
Stürmer, Michael (2000), The German Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)
Stuewer, Roger H. (1975), The Compton Effect: Turning Point in Physics (New York: Science History Publications)
Susskind, Charles (1995), Heinrich Hertz: A Short Life (San Francisco: San Francisco Press)
Tegmark, Max and John Wheeler (2001), ‘100 Years of quantum Mysteries’, Scientific American, February, 54–61
Teich, Mikulas and Roy Porter (eds) (1990), Fin de Siècle and its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Teichmann, Jürgen, Michael Eckert, and Stefan Wolff (2002), ‘Physicists and Physics in Munich’, Physics in Perspective, 4, 333–359
Thomson, George P. (1964), J.J. Thomson and the Cavendish Laboratory in his day (London: Nelson)
Thorne, Kip S. (1994), Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (London: Picador)
Trigg, Roger (1989), Reality at Risk: A Defence of Realism in Philosophy and the Sciences (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf)
Treiman, Sam (1999), The Odd quantum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Tuchman, Barbara W. (1966), The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan)
Uhlenbeck, George E. (1976), ‘Personal reminiscences’, Physics Today, June. Reprinted in Weart and Phillips (1985)
Van der Waerden, B.L. (1967), Sources of quantum Mechanics (New York: Dover Publications)
Weart, Spencer R. and Melba Phillips (eds) (1985), History of Physics: Readings from Physics Today (New York: American Institute of Physics)
Weber, Robert L. (1981), Pioneers of Science: Nobel Prize Winners in Physics (London: The Scientific Book Club)
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (1985), The German Empire (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers)
Weinberg, Steven (1993), Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (London: Hutchinson)
Weinberg, Steven (2003), The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Weiner, Charles (ed.) (1977), History of Twentieth Century Physics (New York: Academic)
Wheaton, Bruce R. (2007), ‘Atomic Waves in Private Practice’, in Evans and Thorndike (2007)
Wheeler, John A. (1994), At Home in the Universe (Woodbury, NY: AIP Press)
Wheeler, John A. and Wojciech H. Zurek (eds) (1983), quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Whitaker, Andrew (2002), ‘John Bell in Belfast: Early Years and Education’, in Bertlmann and Zeilinger (2002)
Wilson, David (1983), Rutherford: Simple Genius (London: Hodder and Stoughton)
Wolf, Fred Alan (1988), Parallel Universes: The Search for Other Worlds (London: The Bodley Head)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For many years the photograph of those who gathered in Brussels in October 1927 for the fifth Solvay conference hung on my wall. Occasionally I would pass it and think that it was the perfect starting point for a narrative history of the quantum. When I finally wrote a proposal for Quantum, I had the great good fortune of submitting it to Patrick Walsh. His enthusiasm was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. I was lucky a second time when the talented science editor and publisher Peter Tallack joined Conville & Walsh and became my agent. To Pete I offer my heartfelt thanks for being both friend and agent through the years that this book took to write and for handling with grace all the difficulties that arose from my prolonged bouts of ill-he
alth. Together with Pete, Jake Smith-Bosanquet has served as my point man for the foreign language publishers of Quantum; I would like to express my thanks to him and the rest of the team at Conville & Walsh, particularly Claire Conville and Sue Armstrong, for their steadfast support and help. It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to thank Michael Carlisle and especially Emma Parry for their work on my behalf in the USA.
I owe a great deal to the studies of scholars cited in the notes and listed in the bibliography; however, I am particularly indebted to Denis Brian, David C. Cassidy, Albrecht Fölsing, John L. Heilbron, Martin J. Klein, Jagdish Mehra, Walter Moore, Dennis Overbye, Abraham Pais, Helmut Rechenberg, and John Stachel. I would like to thank Guido Bacciagaluppi and Anthony Valentini for making available the first English-language translation of the proceedings of the fifth Solvay conference and their commentary prior to its publication.
Pandora Kay-Kreizman, Ravi Bali, Steven Böhm, Jo Cambridge, Bob Cormican, John Gillott, and Eve Kay all read drafts of the book. Thanks go to each and every one of them for their astute criticism and suggestions. Mitzi Angel was at one time my editor and her insightful comments on an earlier draft of the book were invaluable. Christopher Potter was an early champion of Quantum and I am deeply grateful to him for having been so. Simon Flynn, my publisher at Icon Books, has been indefatigable in bringing the book to press. He has done much that was beyond the call of duty and I thank him for it. Duncan Heath has been an astonishingly eagle-eyed copy-editor; every writer should be so fortunate. I am grateful to Andrew Furlow and Najma Finlay of Icon for their enthusiasm and work on behalf of Quantum and to Nicholas Halliday for producing the fine diagrams that illustrate the text. Thanks also go to Neal Price and his team at Faber & Faber.
This book would not have been possible without the unfailing support over many years of Lahmber Ram, Gurmit Kaur, Rodney Kay-Kreizman, Leonora Kay-Kreizman, Rajinder Kumar, Santosh Morgan, Eve Kay, John Gillott, and Ravi Bali.