Book Reviews
- PDF / 150,525 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 147 Views
Physics in Perspective
Book Reviews
John Gribbin, Erwin Schro¨dinger and the Quantum Revolution. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013, 321 pages. $27.95 (cloth). Recent years have witnessed the publication of at least a couple of major biographies of participants in the quantum revolution (David Cassidy’s Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb, and Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom); one collective biography (Sheilla Jones’s The Quantum Ten); and one overview of the history of quantum physics from its inception to today (Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story). Whether or not they have read any or all of these books, readers of Physics in Perspective might consider paying homage to the centenary of the Bohr atom by reading Gribbin’s short and accessible biography of Erwin Schro¨dinger, including but not limited to the role he played in the quantum revolution. Having read (and reviewed) all of the above books but never a full-scale biography of Schro¨dinger, I was pleased to find much that I didn’t already know in the prolific John Gribbin’s portrait of his subject. But first a word about Gribbin’s broad overview of the history of physics, painted in very broad strokes, in which he frames this portrait. Gribbin’s compression of the history of science yields some insights that I find convincing but also others that appear forced or questionable. An example of the former appears in Chapter Two, ‘‘Physics before Schro¨dinger,’’ in which Gribbin argues that although Galileo is usually credited with being the first to develop the scientific method, that claim might more properly be made about William Gilbert, who was twenty years Galileo’s senior. In De Magnete, which we know Galileo read ‘‘from approving comments he made about Gilbert’s book in a letter,’’ Gilbert, in carefully laying out the ‘‘foundations of magnetic science,’’ also describes the methodology of science in general: ‘‘In the discovery of hidden things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.’’ I was also struck by Gribbin’s comparison of Schro¨dinger’s ‘‘astonishing creative outburst’’ in 1926, in which he published the six papers that essentially completed wave mechanics, to Einstein’s output in his annus mirabilis of 1905. Gribbin is careful to note here that Einstein’s effort ‘‘arguably surpassed’’ Schro¨dinger’s achievement simply because of the breadth of the subjects his five papers covered. An example of a claim that Gribbin makes that seems exaggerated, however, comes in Chapter Fourteen, ‘‘Schro¨dinger’s Scientific Legacy,’’ in which he asserts that ‘‘arguably the most significant development in science in the twentieth century’’ was ‘‘the resolution of the EPR ‘Paradox’ and experimental confirmation that quantum entanglement… is real.’’ Surely genetic engineering and biotechnology, space e
Data Loading...
