Quantum 101

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - The Mechanical Dream
3. Chapter Two - The Trouble with Light
4. Chapter Three - Planck’s Constant
5. Chapter Four - Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis
6. Chapter Five - Bohr’s Ring of Fire
7. Chapter Six - The Rise of the Quantum Men
8. Chapter Seven - Schrödinger’s Equation
9. Chapter Eight - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
10. Chapter Nine - The Copenhagen Interpretation
11. Chapter Ten - The Cat in the Box
12. Chapter Eleven - Dirac’s Sea
13. Chapter Twelve - Feynman’s Diagrams
14. Chapter Thirteen - Bell’s Theorem
15. Chapter Fourteen - The Experiments That Broke Everything
16. Chapter Fifteen - The Many-Worlds Problem
17. Chapter Sixteen - Quantum Field Theory
18. Chapter Seventeen - The Higgs and the LHC

Excerpt

PROLOGUE FOR MOST OF human history, we thought the universe was smooth. We believed time flowed like a river. That objects moved in straight lines. That the future could be predicted if only we had enough information. That reality was out there. Real, solid, objective, and we were just watching it unfold. That illusion held for centuries. Newton gave us a clockwork cosmos. Laplace promised that if we knew every position and momentum, we could calculate the entire future. Everything was mechanical. Everything was knowable. But then we looked closer. Light wasn’t just a wave. It wasn’t just a particle. It was both, and neither, depending on how we looked. Atoms didn’t behave like little solar...