Tobias Hürter - Böcker

There may never be another era of science like the first half of the twentieth century, when a peerless cast of physicists—Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others—came together to uncover the quantum world, a concept so outrageous and shocking, so contrary to traditional physics, that its own founders rebelled against it until the equations held up and fundamentally changed our understanding of reality. In propulsive, page-turning chapters, Tobias Hürter takes us back to a uniquely harrowing and momentous time, when war and revolution upended the lives of these renegade scientists, who were forced to crisscross Europe as they worked together to topple classical physics.These tumultuous decades would also be the culmination and closing chapter of a more serendipitous—and more human—kind of research. Today, physics has principally become a practical discipline conducted at large-scale facilities. Great breakthroughs are now rarely made in the mind, or among colleagues sparring during walks on the beach, at Christmas parties, in university cafeterias, or late-into-the-night debates at conferences. Too Big for a Single Mind takes us back to this golden age of physics, when the creation of quantum theory demanded the combined efforts of friends and rivals, lovers and loners, straight-edged intellectuals and freethinking dreamers. In this stirring, grand narrative, brought to life by the letters, notes, research papers, diaries, and memoirs they wrote, we witness the birth of an idea that not only revolutionized physics and our world, but that stands as a testament to the boundless potential of genius in collaboration.

“A new, exciting approach to the literature about this momentous era.”—The Wall Street JournalThere may never be another era of science like the first half of the twentieth century, when a peerless cast of physicists—Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, and others—came together to uncover the quantum world, a concept so outrageous and contrary to traditional physics that its own founders rebelled against it until the equations held up and fundamentally changed our understanding of reality.In page-turning chapters, Tobias Hürter takes us back to this momentous time in science history, when the creation of quantum theory demanded the combined efforts of friends and rivals, lovers and loners, straight-edged intellectuals and freethinking dreamers—and when, with the Nazis in pursuit of an atomic bomb, the stakes couldn’t be higher. In this stirring, grand narrative, brought to life by letters, notes, research papers, diaries, and memoirs, we witness the birth of an idea that revolutionized both physics and our world at large and unleashed the profound and terrifying power of the atom—and that ultimately stands as a testament to the boundless potential of genius in collaboration.

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century.Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn’t only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines.The work of the twentieth century’s most important physicists produced scientific breakthroughs that led to an entirely new view of physics — and a view of the universe that is still not fully understood today, even as evidence for its accuracy is all around us. The men and women who made these discoveries were intellectual adventurers, renegades, dandies, and nerds, some bound together by deep friendship; others, by bitter enmity. But the age of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was also the age of wars and revolutions. The discovery of radioactivity transformed science, but also led to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout The Age of Uncertainty, Hürter reminds us about the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it.