A Nobel laureate offers a brief lesson on physics’ biggest mystery, accessibly explaining the two quantum revolutions that changed our understanding of reality.
 
At the start of the twentieth century, the first quantum revolution upset our vision of the world. New physics offered surprising realities, such as wave-particle duality, and led to major inventions: the transistor, the laser, and today’s computers. Less known is the second quantum revolution, arguably initiated in 1935 during a debate between giants Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. This revolution is still unfolding. Its revolutionaries—including the author of this short accessible book, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Alain Aspect—explore the notion of entangled particles, able to interact at seemingly impossible distances. Aspect’s research has helped to show how entanglement may both upend existing technologies, like cryptography, and usher in entirely new ones, like quantum computing. Explaining this physics of the future, this work tells a story of how philosophical debates can shape new realities.

The first comprehensive philosophical and historical account of the experimental foundations of Niels Bohr’s practice of physics.

Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this book, philosopher of science Slobodan Perović explores the way Bohr practiced and understood physics, and analyzes its implications for our understanding of modern science. Perović develops a novel approach to Bohr’s understanding of physics and his method of inquiry, presenting an exploratory symbiosis of historical and philosophical analysis that uncovers the key aspects of Bohr’s philosophical vision of physics within a given historical context.

To better understand the methods that produced Bohr’s breakthrough results in quantum phenomena, Perović clarifies the nature of Bohr’s engagement with the experimental side of physics and lays out the basic distinctions and concepts that characterize his approach. Rich and insightful, Perović’s take on the early history of quantum mechanics and its methodological ramifications sheds vital new light on one of the key figures of modern physics.

A series of engaging essays that explore iconic moments of discovery and debate in physicists’ ongoing quest to understand the quantum world.

The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism, cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age.
 
In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists’ still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays, Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great minds of the era—Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature—as they have tried to make sense of a messy world.
 
Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own, researchers’ ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that might reach beyond a given researcher’s limited view. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to forge some shared understanding between individuals and across generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between scientific exploration and the human condition.

An exploration of how nonlinear storytelling opens a post-Newtonian reality and changes both the hero’s journey and how we understand history in film and television.

Begin at the beginning and keep going until the end. That’s the cardinal rule of conventional storytelling. But ever since the modernists of the early twentieth century, popular narratives have occasionally eschewed this linear approach to temporality. It’s as though our stories, formerly unfolding in the stable, predictable universe of Newtonian physics, can now take place in multidimensional time where anything and anyone can be as incalculable as Schrödinger’s cat.

Quantum Screens is a journey through the past and present of nonlinear time in film and television. Moving beyond the early experiments of Luis Buñuel and the first nonlinear commercial films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Martha Nochimson shows how risk-taking auteurs David Lynch, Damon Lindelof, and Terrence Malik have opened new horizons and a new concept of beauty in storytelling through their revelatory creations. Quantum Screens takes us deep into the audience’s experience of nonlinearity, exploring the emotional dislocations such storytelling creates, using television programs such as Twin Peaks, Westworld, and Watchmen, and films including The Tree of Life, BlacKkKlansman, and Arrival. Indeed, viewers are at the heart of a changing aesthetics of nonlinearity, Nochimson argues. Amid innovations like on-demand viewing, unlimited replay, and binge-watching, the experience of real time is more malleable than ever, and creators are responding by structuring their stories in compelling new ways.