The Strange Story of the Quantum

The Strange Story of the Quantum: An Account for the General Reader of the growth of the IDEAS underlying our present ATOMIC KNOWLEDGE by Banesh Hoffmann, Department of Mathematics, Queens College, New York. Dover Publications, INC., NEW YORK. First published in 1947.

I’ve had a copy of this book for as long as I can remember. I think I might of bought it second-hand back in the late 80’s from a place, long gone now, called The White Elephant, in Chatswood Sydney. My sister and I used to walk pass this place twice a day; on our way to school and then home.

I had no idea what a quantum was but decided to buy the book anyway on account of it’s small size and very mysterious title. It was and remains to be a totally accessible – dealing with quantum mechanics through the lens of history and tells the fascinating story of the "new" physics.

By means of analogies, examples, and imaginative insights, the book acquaints the layman with the historical development and basic meaning of such momentous theories as Bohr's energy levels of the atom and Feynman's world lines, electron spin, and the quantum number.

Hoffman attempts to do justice to Heisenberg and Dirac's approaches as well as Schrödinger's, something that never seems to be done nowadays in books for a popular audience.

Hoffman himself explains the story of the quantum is the story of a confused and groping search for knowledge conducted by scientists of many lands on a front wider than the world of physics had ever seen before, illumined by flashes of insight, aided by accidents and guess, and enlivened by coincidences such as one would expect to find only in fiction.