Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World

Now in paperback: The epic story of how, amid two World Wars, history's greatest physicists redefined realityand ignited the atomic age

"A new, exciting approach to the literature about this momentous era."The Wall Street Journal

There may never be another era of science like the first half of the twentieth century, when a peerless cast of physicistsAlbert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, and otherscame 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 dreamersand 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 atomand that ultimately stands as a testament to the boundless potential of genius in collaboration.

Dettagli