Manjit Kumar Books

Scientific revolutions rarely begin with a dramatic collapse; more often, they start as small anomalies that refuse to go away. Kumar shows that quantum theory emerged from exactly this kind of slow fracture within classical physics. For roughly two centuries, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s elect...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

Big transformations often begin with ideas their creators do not fully believe. Kumar captures this irony through Max Planck and Albert Einstein, two figures who helped launch quantum theory while remaining uneasy about where it would lead. Planck, trying to solve the problem of blackbody radiation ...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

The closer science looked at matter, the less solid and intuitive it appeared. Kumar traces how early twentieth-century discoveries shattered the old image of the atom as a miniature, stable mechanical object. J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron revealed that atoms were divisible. Ernest Ruthe...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

One of the most unsettling lessons of quantum theory is that nature does not fit neatly into the categories our minds prefer. Kumar explains how the development of matrix mechanics by Werner Heisenberg and wave mechanics by Erwin Schrödinger transformed physics in the 1920s. At first these approache...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

Sometimes the most radical idea is not a new fact but a new way of interpreting facts. Kumar presents Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity as one of the boldest intellectual responses to quantum phenomena. Bohr argued that wave and particle descriptions are not mutually exclusive mistakes but c...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality

The greatest critics of a theory are sometimes the people who helped create it. Kumar portrays Einstein not as an old genius unable to adapt, but as a principled thinker who believed quantum mechanics, however successful, was incomplete. Einstein accepted many quantum results and contributed decisiv...

From Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality