Reviews for A New Understanding of the Atom

The average rating for A New Understanding of the Atom based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-25 00:00:00 Stephanie Vannarath Quantum-Theory is a rather complicated matter of which I knew next to nothing prior to reading this book. Of course I heard of some players in this field, like Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, or Heisenberg, but it was all very vague and left me standing pretty much in the dark. Manjit Kumar was able to shed at least a little light (some photons if you like) on the topic, and I got a glimpse on this extraordinary achievement of human mind. Spanning roughly the time between 1900 (Planck's constant) and the mid 1960s (Everett's many world interpretation) this books explains QT/QM in a language that makes it relatively easy for this layman to follow. There's hardly any mathematics in this book and only a few diagrams. The author sets the weight on the essential leaps in developing the theory and adds some intriguing biographical and historical background on the physicists involved. I suppose everyone heard of "Schrödinger's cat". This thought experiment is explained pretty well, and also why Schrödinger invented it in the first place. Much more interesting to me though was the Einstein-Bohr debate. Apparently Einstein has spend a lot of his energy to refute Bohr's interpretation of QM. Alas, he failed. For scientists, this book is certainly too superficial, but I think in order to gain an outside perspective on quantum mechanics this is an excellent read. UPDATE 1/16/16 Dramatis personæ; at the Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, 1927 [click to enlarge and read names] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-01 00:00:00 Darrell Perry If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review. In the 15th chapter the key to Quantum Mechanics (QM). It was Richard Feynman who said, "I think it is safe to say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics." This book does not help either. Quantum mechanics is the spookiest theoretical framework ever devised by man. Cats that are at the same time alive and dead ("Superposition" = "We do not know"; "Collapsing the superposition" = "finding out" whether the cat is alive and kicking), objects that are both particles and waves, etc. 3 stars for the two chapters dealing with the 1927 and 1930 Solvay conferences.