"Uncertainty" by David Lindley

This is the best account of the history of the development of quantum physics that I have read. 

The story of how Heisenberg came up with his uncertainty principle, charting the demise of determinism in physics, from the prehistory of Brownian motion, through the first stirrings of radioactivity and quantum physics by Becquerel and Rutherford and Planck and Einstein, through the Bohr model of the atom to the alternative versions of quantum mechanics proposed by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. Having taught physics for 34 years, I was familiar with the concepts and much of this history but this book (written by an old house mate of mine from student days) is a hugely lucid account of how a remarkably small group of people constructed some revolutionary and philosophically difficult theories. It clearly shows their contributions and explores the human side of their interactions, as well as giving due credit to some of the other key players with whose names we are less familiar today, such as Eastbourne's own Frederick Soddy, de Broglie, Born and Bohm, Compton and Pauli and Sommerfield. It also shows what a ridiculous own goal Hitler scored when he expelled key 'non-Aryan' scientists, hugely impoverishing German science; an own goal the Brexiteers seem determined to want to repeat.

Selected quotes:

• "Dead particles of dust clearly couldn't move of their own volition, nor was any external influence pushing them around. Yet move they all too plainly did. ... Faced with this impossible dilemma, science took the prudent course and ignored Brownian motion for decades." (Ch 1) Brown's book about this is mentioned in Middlemarch!
• "Because he developed in Munich a lifelong habit of staying out late at bars and cafes, Pauli generally missed morning lectures." (Ch 6)
• "Heisenberg had ... depicted the electron's physical presence as a combination of things it might be doing, rather than some specific indication of where it was." (Ch 11)
• "In his crazed desire to promote Aryan culture and safeguard Germany from noxious foreign influences, Hitler succeeded in the space of just a few years in destroying Germany's preeminent position in physics." (Ch 14)
• "Schools of science, as of art or music, rarely stay for long in one place." (Ch 15)
• "Spengler's method is to lay out reams of detail and weighty quantities of obscure facts, and then, as the reader's head begins to nod, to leap adroitly to grand assertions about what it all must mean." (Ch 15) I have noticed a similar technique with writers in the earth-mysteries genre such as von Daniken: they 'leap adroitly to grand assertions about what it all means' having puzzled the reader with perplexing mysteries; I call this the 'wow-thus' argument. But it's not much different in philosophy; some philosophers spend 90% of their books using detailed and sometimes nit-picking scrutiny to demolish each system of their opponents undermining all of the reader's previous beliefs, until the reader is desperate for some sort of ground on which to stand, at which point they rush out their own, virtually unexamined, grand system. 
• "Uncertainty did not erupt capriciously in the mid-1920s. It had been welling up for a decade or more already by then, forcing itself upon the reluctant consciousness of scientists." (Ch 15)
• "In the rise of uncertainty in Germany ... there's an irreducible element of contingency ... In this respect scientific history is like history in general." (Ch 15)
• "For most philosophers, though, loosey-goosey won't do." (Ch 17)

This is the best account of the history of quantum physics I have read. It is one of the books on which Benjamin Labatut based his misleading collection of fictionalised biographies 'When we cease to understand the world'. Readers interested in this topic would be well advised to read Philip Ball's Beyond Weird which provides an update into the concepts which is as understandable as I have ever found a book about this difficult topic. 

Other books on Science and Scientists which are reviewed in this blog may be found on this page.

November 2022; 222 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God