Too Big for a Single Mind

The epic, page-turning 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, page-turning 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.