MANJIT KUMAR has degrees in physics and philosophy. He was the founding editor of Prometheus, an interdisciplinary journal that covered the arts and sciences, described by one reviewer as ‘perhaps the finest magazine that I’ve ever read’. He is the co-author of Science and the Retreat from Reason, which introduced key areas of modern science while defending the Enlightenment notions of social progress and scientific advance against the loss of faith in progress and science. Published in 1995 in the UK by Merlin Press, it was critically acclaimed as a ‘corrective to the hype’, ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘undoubtedly one of the best introductions one can find to the crisis of confidence within science itself’. He has written and reviewed for various publications including the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Irish Times, and is currently consulting science editor at UK Wired magazine. He lives in north London with his wife and two sons.

Links
Manjit Kumar's website

QUANTUM
Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
MANJIT KUMAR

Shortlisted for the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize

Longlisted for the 2009 Royal Society Science Book Prize

One of the best guides yet to the central conundrums of modern physics – John Banville, ‘Books of the Year’, MELBOURNE AGE

An exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars – Steven Poole, GUARDIAN

A super-collider of a book, shaking together an exotic cocktail of free-thinking physicists, tracing their chaotic interactions and seeing what God-particles and black holes fly up out of the maelstrom. [Manjit Kumar] provides probably the most lucid and detailed intellectual history ever written of a body of theory that makes other scientific revolutions look limp-wristed by comparison. Sex, suicide and genocide get a look-in too, but in the end the fate of the world seems to hang on the random trajectories of invisible specks of matter – Andy Martin, INDEPENDENT

Kumar is an accomplished writer who knows how to separate the excitement of the chase from the sometimes impenetrable mathematics. In QUANTUM he tells the story of the conflict between two of the most powerful intellects of their day: the hugely famous Einstein and the less well-known but just as brilliant Dane, Niels Bohr – FINANCIAL TIMES

An elegantly written and accessible guide to quantum physics, in which Kumar structures the narrative history around the clash between Einstein and Bohr, and the anxiety that quantum theory 'disproved the existence of reality' – SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

QUANTUM is a fascinating, powerful and brilliantly written book that shows one of the most important theories of modern science in the making and discusses its implications for our ideas about the fundamental nature of the world and human knowledge, while presenting intimate and insightful portraits of people who made the science. Highly recommended – thebookbag.co.uk

Without quantum theory our world would not exist. Yet for sixty years most physicists believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality itself. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century.

Quantum theory is weird. Albert Einstein was one of the first to recognize the radical nature of quantum theory – it was his 1905 paper on the quantum that he considered ‘very revolutionary’, not the one on relativity for which he is chiefly remembered. As a result, light came to be seen as a particle, not a wave, defying two hundred years of experiments. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Erwin Schrödinger’s infamous dead-or-alive cat are similarly strange. As the Danish theoretician Niels Bohr said, if you aren’t shocked by quantum theory, you don’t really understand it.

In 1925, the quantum pioneers nearly all hailed from upper-middle-class academic families; most were German; and their average age was 24. Their irrational, romantic spirit, formed in reaction to the mechanized slaughter of the First World War, inspired their will to test science to its limits. Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac – all played their part in this very human and tangled story of love, tragedy and rivalry, as well as muddle, mistakes, intuition, creativity and disappointment.

Manjit Kumar’s centrepiece in this dramatic and superbly written history is the fierce battle between Einstein and Bohr about the nature of reality and the soul of science. ‘Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of scientists into believing that the problem had been solved’, lamented the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. After nearly eighty years, Einstein has been vindicated.

Publisher: Icon (UK)/Norton (US)
Pub date: 2 October 2008 (UK)/May 2010 (US)
Length: 480 pages

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Geração), Croatia (Izvori), France (Jean-Claude Lattes), Germany (Berlin), Greece (Patakis), Italy (Arnoldo Mondadori), Netherlands (Ambo/Anthos), Sweden (Norstedts)