Beyond Bohr and Einstein

Quantum Drama, by Jim Baggott and John L Heilbron, Oxford University Press When I was an undergraduate physics student in the mid-1980s, I fell in love with the philosophy of quantum mechanics. I devoured biographies of the greats of early-20th-century atomic physics – physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac, Fermi and Born. To me, as I was struggling with the formalism of quantum mechanics, there seemed to be something so exciting, magical even, about that era, particularly those wonder years of the mid-1920s when its mathematical framework was being developed and the secrets of the quantum world were revealing themselves. I went on to do a PhD in nuclear reaction theory, which meant I spent most of my time working through mathema­tical derivations, becoming familiar with S-matrices, Green’s functions and scattering amplitudes, scribbling pages of angular-momentum algebra and coding in Fortran 77. And I loved that stuff. There certainly seemed to be little time f ... Read full article.