THE QUANTUM MOMENT

Quantum mechanics has profoundly and unexpectedly transformed not only science but human culture as well: The Quantum Moment combines an exhilarating history of the quantum with shrewd insight into our experience of the everyday.

Do we live in one of many parallel worlds, with near-identical versions of ourselves spread across the multiverse? Is a “quantum leap” unthinkably massive or subatomically small? The language and the imagery of quantum mechanics are ubiquitous, yet the science—and its journey into everyday language—still confounds us. In The Quantum Moment, Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber tell how a controversial idea from an obscure branch of optics grew in complexity and authority, eventually dominating the scientific community and commanding the attention of the culture at large. Recounting fiery disputes between figures including Einstein, Schrödinger, and Pauli, the authors trace popular images—time travel, parallel worlds, random behavior—back to their scientific roots and uncover modern manifestations in everything from architecture and sculpture to the prose of John Updike. The Quantum Moment combines an exhilarating history of the quantum with shrewd insight into our experience of the everyday. Robert P. Crease is the chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University and the author of, among other works, World in the Balance. Alfred S. Goldhaber is a professor of physics at Stony Brook University and has written on the study of elementary particles, magnetic monopoles, and cosmology.