A good history of the pioneering of QM, focusing on Heisenberg and uncertainty in particular.

I read this book as if I was watching a movie in my head. This book has little to do with the complex formula of Quantum Mechanics but everything to do about the complex characters that created the concepts that led to Quantum Mechanics. I was slightly amused to finish the book and feel I had a better understanding of how Quantum Mechanics came about but now i was more lost than ever as to the people that made it so. Its a lot to wrap your head around when your continually blown away how people

This book is a history of the development of the uncertainty principle (a.k.a. Heisenberg principle). It explains the interaction of Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr (as well as the contributions of many others) in the development of this principle. The book makes the history clear, but I'm still trying to get my mind around the principle. The principle applies to atomic and subatomic particles, and basically says that it's impossible to know location and velocity (or momentum) at the same time. It...

Albert Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, Planck, Rutherford, De Broglie, Dirac, Chadwick, Yukawa... "Nobis natus, nobis datus"It was unintentionally to write review on Pi day that is AE's Birthday as well! But, I like this coincidence.Back to review!It was disturbing experience when first time encountered "uncertainty"! In my read I understood that our possibilities to acquire full knowledge about the world that is surrounding us on it's macro and micro scale are very limited! We can't kn...

This seems like a well-researched and well-written book about the rise of quantum mechanics, and in particular how it caused a revolution in scientific thinking. Although statistical methods had been devised and used before quantum mechanics, they had been considered a tool for getting at the underlying causality, but not meaningful in themselves. It became clear through quantum mechanic research that relying on statistics and probabilities was not just a tool, but that these were (are) basic co...

Highly recommended. Almost 70% of the book is highlighted Here’s my favorite quotes from the book:https://twitter.com/i__athary/status/...

Say you want to know the speed and position of something very small like a single particle (pick one: quarks, leptons, gluons, photons, and Higgs). Easy. You build a device to throw a beam of photons at the particle. The more photons you throw, the more precise your measure of its position. However, your intense beam of photons will change the particle’s velocity. Remember that velocity is the change in position over time, thus your experiment is changing the particle being observed. Therefore,

This an elegantly written and concise history of the origin and development of quantum theory, with particular emphasis on what the author considers its main flight from classical physics, namely the introduction of non-epistemic stochasticity and of causal events. Starting with a recollection of the introduction of epistemic stochasticity with the kinetic theory of gases and the discovery of radioactive decays, the author goes through old quantum theory and then focuses on the ramification of B...

I first learned about a version of the Uncertainty Principle in high school. I remember at the time thinking that it was pretty trippy - that you could only know the position or the speed of a subatomic participle, not both. How where there things that you couldn't learn about the physical world?Turns out the Uncertainty Principle as I remember it is both slightly inaccurate (it's the momentum, not speed) and much simplified. And, the story behind how it came to be is just fascinating.Lindley's

The early 20th century was by no means an orderly, calm period in the world of theoretical physics. New discoveries in relativity and quantum mechanics were casting increasing doubt on classical physics. Scientists were learning that some phenomena, taking place at the unseeable atomic level, seemed not to be deterministic and predictable, but probabilistic and not so predictable.Uncertainty provides an informative overview of the major players during this era, and explores the disarray that a c...

I was disappointed. Not completely, but what's the point of a book on Einstein, Heisenberg, et al without the formulas? Where were the scientific formulas? I'm not going to pretend I would have understood them all (ok or even 97% of them), but I was most interested in how they came up with the theories -- and I got the history and some of the science, but none of the specifics. I wanted to see some of those crazy mathematical symbols that are used in NUMB3RS. I get that the book was written for

An excellent account of the social -- and interpersonal -- history surrounding uncertainty in science. Accessible to the layperson (me). However, at the key juncture where Heisenberg intuits the structural, irreducibly uuncertain aspects of quantum behavior, the author may have erred too far on the side of accessibility. He needed to slow down and explain with 10% more rigor what Heisenberg et al actually determined. I was ready to do the work, but the author didn't really give me the chance. Bu...

An excellent book, allowing mathematically challenged readers like me to grasp the impenetrable labyrinth of quantum mechanics through a sequential telling of its history.

Completed this wonderful book on the history of quantum science by David Lindley. A gripping read which charts the history of quantum physics from the early decades of the 20th century till the years after the conclusion of the Second World War. The book starts with Robert Brown and his Brownian Motion, ending with the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg. Reading this book I got to know more closely each of the characters involved in this journey chief among them being Bohr and Heisenberg; Bohr

I think I liked this book.But I'm not sure. :)In a futile quest to understand quantum mechanics, I consume every layman's book on the subject that I can find. If you're as obsessed with that mystifying subject as I am -- and if, like me, you lack the serious mathematics and physics background that you'd need to be able to acquire a *real* understanding -- then I think you'll enjoy this book."Uncertainty" is more of a history of the milieu from which quantum mechanics sprang than an attempt to im...

Very personal and historic look at the founding of modern physics. Very nice read.

Too much history, not enough science

I am fascinated by shifts in world view. The world is still the same, but our stories about that world change. In effect, nothing is the same.Issac Newton described a clockwork world as part of the Enlightenment. Einstein pivoted and described a world that was almost the same but yet different. Heisenberg pulled the rug out from both of them by saying that we could not know what the details of the world (at least at the quantum level) really were. It is more complicated than that, but you need t...

this book stands in relation to physics as art history is to art. I can't remember why I put it on my to-read list. I think perhaps it got a very good review in The Economist.It is interesting to put some colour on the main players. We learn at school that 'the atom is like this,' and 'Brownian motion is that.' But to follow people devoting their lives to figuring it out, based on what they knew at the time, puts it all in quite a different perspective.

This book was almost a very good book, and could have been a great book. As is, it's a pretty good text focusing on the construction of quantum mechanics (QM), with Bohr & Heisenberg playing leading roles. Though the book is very much a a personality-centric account of this early history, it goes enough into the details of the construction to provide decent value for those who may be interested in understanding the motivations for the way the theory ended up in our contemporary era. In particula...