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The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics - Publisher: Gotham
- Year: 2010
- Pages: 336
Quantum physics (or mechanics) has become something of a metonym for impossibly-abstruse concepts; it’s a new-millennium update to the classic “brain surgery” and “rocket science”. I own a t-shirt with a pithy joke about Schrödinger’s cat, and when people are unfortunate enough to ask and I tell them about undefined states and the collapse of probabilistic wave functions, I often get glassy stares in return.
But don’t let me fool you: I know, on a high level, about Schrödinger’s cat, and I remember my Pauli Exclusion Principle from high school chemistry, and I’ve read enough Scientific American to have gotten short primers on some of the fundamentals, but my real understanding of quantum mechanics is like a half-rotted shack in the forest, while Kakalios’ knowledge might be a large McMansion in a new suburb; the real geniuses at the forefront of the field would be palatial estates with Robin Leach narrating.
