For most of the twentieth century, physicists used quantum mechanics as a rulebook to explain why the world behaves strangely at small scales, not as a set of instructions to run. The transistor and the laser both exist because engineers understood and exploited quantum rules, but the devices themselves still store and shuffle information as…
For nearly three decades, the two most famous physicists of the twentieth century argued about whether quantum mechanics was telling the truth about the universe — not about its equations, which both men accepted, but about what those equations meant. Albert Einstein thought the theory was a triumph and also, somehow, incomplete: a magnificently useful…
In the summer of 1925, a 23-year-old German physicist retreated to a treeless, wind-scoured rock in the North Sea to escape a bad case of hay fever, and came back with the mathematics that would end classical physics’s two-century run. Within eighteen months, a rival formulation appeared from Zurich built on entirely different ideas, the…
In March 1913, a 27-year-old Danish physicist sent Ernest Rutherford, his former supervisor in Manchester, a paper that shouldn’t have worked. It borrowed a strange, unproven idea from Max Planck’s theory of heat radiation and welded it onto Rutherford’s own nuclear atom, and in doing so it explained something no one had been able to…
In the spring of 1905, a twenty-six-year-old patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland, was reviewing applications for mechanical inventions during the day and rewriting the foundations of physics at night. He had no laboratory, no university post, and no research group. What he had was a stack of unresolved problems that the physics of the nineteenth…
In December 1900, a cautious, deeply conservative Berlin physicist stood before the German Physical Society and proposed an idea he did not fully believe himself. He suggested that energy, at least when it comes to how hot objects radiate light, is not smooth and continuous, as everyone had always assumed. It comes in discrete chunks….
