
Too Big for a Single Mind
How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World
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Narrated by:
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Paul Bellantoni
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By:
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Tobias Hürter
The epic gripping history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century
The epic true story of how a global team of physics luminaries—Einstein, Curie, Schrödinger, and more—toppled the Newtonian universe amid the turmoil of two World Wars
There may never be another era of science like the first half of the twentieth century, when many of the most important physicists ever to live—Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, and others—came together to uncover the quantum world: a concept so outrageous and shocking, so contrary to traditional physics, that its own founders rebelled against it until the equations held up and fundamentally changed our understanding of reality.
In cinematic, gripping chapters, Tobias Hürter takes us back to this uniquely momentous and harrowing time, when war and revolution upended the lives of his renegade scientists. As they crisscross Europe, Hürter reveals these brilliant thinkers anew, as friends and enemies, lovers and loners, and indeed, men and women just like us. Hürter compellingly casts quantum mechanics as a concept Too Big for a Single Mind—and its birth as a testament to the boundless potential of genius in collaboration.
©2022 Tobias Hürter (P)2022 Spotify AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...




















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The ensemble cast of characters woven brilliantly together over years, theories and countries.
Outstanding
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Which is funny, but completely understandable. It probably happened because Paul Bellantoni, who is excellent here, had to stop to ask for advice on how to read the equation, and nobody in the audio production had any idea, so it ended up a a loose end. In any case, it would just have been window dressing in a book like this. Tobias Hürter is telling a story. He makes some rudimentary points about quantum mechanics as part of the narrative, just as he fills in some very basic historical context as needed, but this book isn't where you'd go to learn about either physics or history...
What the book is about is the "generation of physicists" who "uncovered the quantum world," as the title puts it, and as such it's quite informative. I'm reasonably well read about this period, but there was a lot I didn't know about, such as the fact that the EPR paper was written by Pololsky and Rosen and sent out without Einstein's participation or approval. Hürter presents a clear picture of Heisenberg's involvement in the German atomic bomb project and how it reflected his personality, and that in itself is worth the price of admission.
Hürter has a lot of balls to keep in the air here, and he makes it look easy.
If you're interested in this book, it might be worth looking at Grace in All Simplicity, by Chris Quigg and Robert Cahn.
A nice overview, well read
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Play it again Sam
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Outstanding
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Thank you,
JSelway
What an amazing work about the most amazing time in physics!
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Gripping
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Excellent
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Kept interest all thru, got a better model of early 20th cent timeline
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Packed with Science History
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Comprehensive Discussion of Important Atomic Physicists
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