Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World

Now in paperback: The thrilling history of the brilliant minds behind the most revolutionary ideas in physics—quantum theory, relativity, and more!
 
The world may never see another era of science like the first half of the twentieth century, when a peerless cast of physicists—Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others—came together to uncover the quantum world, a concept so outrageous and contrary to traditional physics that its own founders rebelled against it until the equations held up and fundamentally changed our understanding of reality. Tobias Hürter takes us back to a harrowing time when war upended the lives of these renegade scientists who were forced to crisscross Europe as they worked together to topple classical physics.

Too Big for a Single Mind resurrects old letters, notes, research, diaries, and memoirs, recasting these trailblazers as friends and rivals, lovers and loners, intellectuals and dreamers. Readers will witness the birth of ideas that not only revolutionized physics and our world but attest to the boundless potential of genius in collaboration.