The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty, Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, W. W. Norton, 2014. $29.95 (352 pp.). ISBN 978-0-393-06792-7
“There is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings … are meaningless outside of their cultural context,” wrote quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger in a 1952 article in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. In the decades since, historians of science have sought to understand the influence of culture and society on the development of quantum theory. We now know that politics, ideology, counterculture movements, and other cultural matters not only shaped research policies, but also shaped the actual scientific content of quantum theory.
But how has quantum theory influenced human culture? Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber address that question in The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty. The authors evaluate the theory’s impact on such cultural expressions as literature, comic strips, visual art, marketing, and theater. They do so through a fine collection of case studies that show how those activities incorporated quantum theory’s language and imagery—quantum leaps, discontinuity, the uncertainty principle, probability waves, Schrödinger’s cat, many worlds, and more. In many cases, the results have been surprisingly fruitful.
But many physicists disapprove of that borrowing. They believe it has led to misuse and mischaracterization of the scientific concepts. Aware of that concern, Crease and Goldhaber, respectively professors of philosophy and physics, dedicate a considerable portion of the book to arguing that it is appropriate for society to borrow quantum concepts; at the same time, they highlight cases that could be characterized as misuse.
The appropriation of quantum concepts is fruitful and legitimate, the authors argue, when it provides concepts and words to express day-to-day matters that could not be formulated with Newtonian ideas. In their words, quantum theory provides “vivid imagery for capturing our modern experience.” But the effects of quantum theory are potentially even more profound: In the same way that Newtonian perspective influenced the modern world beyond the domain of physics, the authors envisage a world where ideas from quantum theory will be part of everyday life. Then, they quip, we will finally be “quantum natives.”
The Quantum Moment is pleasant and informal; clear and careful discussions of the physics and history also make it widely accessible. The chapters present many historical episodes related to the creation of key concepts in quantum theory, including Planck’s radiation theory, the many-worlds interpretation, and quantum entanglement. Interludes at the end of each chapter contain explanations of key concepts.
However, the historical narrative itself is sometimes imprecise. For instance, the book wrongly states that Albert Einstein, in 1916, was the first physicist to include probability in quantum theory; in fact, Max Planck had already done that in an article published in 1912. The book also states that quantum jumps first appeared in Niels Bohr’s atomic model in 1913, but that idea, too, had appeared in Planck’s 1912 article and in one by Henri Poincaré the same year. Elsewhere the authors credit Bohr with quantizing the action of the hydrogen atom; but the notion that Bohr’s discretization of atomic orbits corresponds to an action quantization was conceived by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916. Later in the book, Bohr’s interpretation of quantum measurement is incorrectly identified with the wavefunction-collapse interpretation. Also, the authors tend to underestimate predecessors: Pre-Newtonian physics, for instance, is called illogical and inconsistent. Those historical narratives align with the long-rejected picture of science as the sudden achievement of a few geniuses.
Overall, though, the historical imprecisions do not diminish the book’s relevance; the main point, concerning the use of words and images from quantum mechanics, does not depend on historical accuracy. The Quantum Moment is a good introduction to concepts in quantum theory and will help us better understand how science is bound up with human culture.
Thiago Hartz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen. His research is about the history of quantum field theory during the 1950s.
