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PHYSICS
UNCERTAINTY: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. David Lindley. x + 257 pp. Doubleday, 2007. $26.
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics. Gino Segre. x + 310 pp. Viking, 2007. $25.95.
In the epic of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics isn't just a central story-it is the central story. The narrative of the development of the microphysical contains just about everything one could desire for a popular-science book: complicated science that demands guided explanation; dramatic concepts that overturn almost all of our intuitions; the trauma of interwar Europe; and a cast of household names in the physics world-Niels Bohr, Wemer Heisenberg and especially Albert Einstein.
It is this last figure who gives the plotline most of its punch, for Einstein, with his paper on the quantum nature of light in 1905, was one of the founders of this revolution in physics. But by the late 1920s he had turned into its arch-critic. As David Lindley puts it in his new book, Uncertainty,
Here is the root of a problem that was to plague Einstein for the rest of his life. He believed in the reality of light quanta sooner than anyone else, but he rebelled more strenuously than anyone else against the implication that light quanta inevitably brought spontaneity and probability into physics.
How do we make sense of Einstein's visceral opposition to quantum mechanics, and especially quantum indeterminism? How could the greatest figure of modern physics be so colossally wrong about something so important?
There are indeed many ironies in the history of quantum mechanics. One of the central ones is not so much what happened to Einstein the historical figure but what happens to the reader who consumes one of these books ravenous for a tale about the great hero-for Einstein is simply not the central figure of this most central story in modern physics. That role goes unequivocally to Niels Bohr. Both Lindley's book and Gino Segre's recently released Faust in Copenhagen place Bohr in the limelight, and understandably so. Einstein might lure the reader in, but quantum mechanics is simply unintelligible without Bohr's concepts (the atom, complementarity) and his social position (as the great sage of Copenhagen).
Both of these books thus...