A series of compelling essays that explore iconic historical moments of discovery and dialogue from the ongoing quest of physicists to understand the quantum world. The ideas at the foundation of quantum theory remain stubbornly, extraordinarily bizarre: a concrete world that boils down to clouds of probabilities; particles that cross barriers via tunneling; zombie cats, neither dead nor alive; twin particles that share entangled fates.

For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while simultaneously experiencing the broader uncertainties of the social and political world around them, in a period marked by the rise of fascism, destructive global wars, and a new nuclear age. In Quantum Legacy, David Kaiser presents to his readers some iconic episodes from the history of the ongoing efforts of physicists to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental levels.

In a series of captivating essays, Kaiser transports us to the heart of iconic historical moments of discovery and intense dialogue, featuring some of the most significant scientists of the era, such as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and Stephen Hawking, who forever changed our understanding of nature. Spanning both space and time, these historical episodes traverse the thrilling 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the upheavals of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed.

In both these periods and our own, the ambition of researchers is often to transcend the particularities of here and now and propose ideas about how the world operates that will endure over time and surpass the narrow confines of a single researcher’s perception. In Quantum Legacy, Kaiser reveals the difficult and often chaotic work required to build a shared understanding among representatives of different generations, thus illuminating the deep connections between scientific inquiry and human nature.

Reviews

“A masterpiece of historical analysis… Masterfully written and a pleasure to read.” —Nature

“Engaging… Leaves us with a richer picture of physics as a living endeavor.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“An ambitious collection of essays that combines the two academic identities [of Kaiser]… A wide-ranging anthology.” —Physics Today

“From Einstein to Heisenberg and from Schrödinger to Hawking, Kaiser presents the human dimension both of them and their ideas while simultaneously forging connections between the inner world of the academic community of quantum theory and the outer world of global historical events. This socio-political approach is particularly significant for enabling the non-specialist reader to identify with various scientific details… In this collection of especially enjoyable essays, he manages to find the golden mean between scientific academia and the narration of an interesting story.” —Engineering & Technology

“Kaiser—writing in a style that sometimes takes the reader on a journey, at other times intrigues him, but always teaches him—offers us here a remarkable collection of brief narratives about significant developments in the history of physics and cosmology of the past century. His stories wonderfully integrate human history into science. This book will be enjoyable and enlightening to readers without specialized scientific knowledge as well as science and history students, but also to professional scientists and historians.” —Kip Thorne, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate in Physics 2017

“Physicists are people! They have insecurities, love lives, financial anxieties, and political views while simultaneously trying to reveal the foundations of reality. Kaiser tells compelling stories that simultaneously attempt to explain fascinating aspects of physics in a vivid way while highlighting the people who labored to discover them.” —Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden

“Have you ever wondered why Schrödinger chose the macabre image of a half-dead cat to describe quantum physics? Want to learn how a purported Soviet spy avoided imprisonment and eventually turned particle physics upside down? Can you guess what spurred the sales of the book The Tao of Physics? If questions like these pique your interest, then this book is for you. I can’t think of a more suitable guide than Kaiser for an inner journey through 20th-century physics. These witty stories beautifully highlight what Kaiser calls the ‘dual nature’ of scientific research, namely its ability to bequeath ideas that endure over time, while simultaneously reflecting the particularities and peculiarities of the historical circumstances at hand.” —Deborah R. Cohen, author of Climate in Motion

Biography

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society and a Professor of Physics in the MIT Department of Physics. Kaiser’s historical research focuses on the development of physics in the U.S. during the Cold War, while his physics research focuses on the cosmology of the early universe. He has also participated in groundbreaking experiments that explored the foundations of quantum theory.