Klett-Cotta, 2021. 398 pages. Nonfiction
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, page-turning chapters, Hürter takes us back to this uniquely momentous and harrowing time, when war and revolution upended the lives of renegade scientists. 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.
Having a background in science, I had heard of all of these scientists and their discoveries. However, my formal education focused more on the interactions between the ideas, whereas Hürter here portrays them as real people, showing how their complex individual and professional lives interacted (and sometimes clashed). The writing is exquisite and flawless, which isn't always the case for work on scientific topics -- or for any narrative nonfiction, for that matter. If you're looking for a deep dive into the science, you might want to look elsewhere. On the other hand, you don't need any sort of prior knowledge to fully appreciate this work, making it quite accessible to the average reader. I'd recommend this to any nonfiction reader interested in science or history.