This book tells the story of the researches that are traditionally lumped together under the label "radiation theory" and revolving, loosely speaking around the familiar heat-and-light exchange (hot bodies emit light and radiate; the absorption of light, especially sunlight, is warming).
These days it is common knowledge that short waves are more powerful than long ones, as the very short ones, known as x-rays, damage living tissues. It took half-a-century to learn this fact: it was one of the great discoveries of young Albert Einstein of 1905. When he announced it leading researchers found it most incredible...
The realization of the importance of entanglement and the clarification of the quantum description of single objects have been at the root of a second quantum revolution, and the John Bell was its prophet.
Intuitively, Planck knew that his work was as important as Newton's in paving a new physics, as he privately confided to his son in 1901. Because of his own conservative beliefs, Planck felt stymied by the revolutionary nature of his own ideas... In truth, Planck was only underestimating the importance of his work, if anything. In retrospect... it started a revolution in science—the quantum revolution—compared to which the Copernican revolution pales.
The development of the quantum ideas themselves occurred in discrete jumps, quantum leaps of the creative insights of a few people.
Quantum mechanics is revolutionary because it overturned scientific concepts that seemed to be so obvious and so well confirmed by experience that they were beyond reasonable question, but it is an incomplete because we still do not know precisely where quantum mechanics will lead us—nor even why it must be true!
In the brief period between 1900 and 1935 there occurred one of the most astonishing outbursts of scientific creativity in all of history. ...no other historical era has crammed so much scientific creativity, so many discoveries of new ideas and techniques, into so few years. Although a few outstanding individuals dominate... they were assisted in their work by an army of talented scientists and technicians.
Above all, the ominous clouds of those phenomena that we are with varying success seeking to explain by means of the quantum of action, are throwing their shadows over the sphere of physical knowledge, threatening no one knows what new revolution.