The Age of Uncertainty

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn't only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hurter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. He immerses us in a half-century of global turmoil against which some of humankind's greatest and strangest scientific discoveries unfolded, expertly guiding us through the brilliant and mind-bending ideas that turned the world on its head.

The work of the twentieth century's most important physicists produced scientific breakthroughs that led to an entirely new view of physics—and a view of the universe that is still not fully understood today, even as evidence for its accuracy is all around us. The men and women who made these discoveries were intellectual adventurers, renegades, dandies, and nerds, some bound together by deep friendship; others, by bitter enmity. But the age of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was also the age of wars and revolutions. The discovery of radioactivity transformed science, but also led to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout The Age of Uncertainty, Hurter reminds us about the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it.

Intriguing and well-written ... The Age of Uncertainty cleverly interweaves the stories of the leading early 20th-century physicists with the political and personal events that shaped their lives ... Hurter's formidable grasp of the great period of quantum discovery represents a new, exciting approach to the literature about this momentous era.
-The Wall Street Journal

The Age of Uncertainty's great strength lies in the way Tobias Hurter brings together the cast of driven, gifted and all-too-human scientists who upended Newtonian physics, showing how the dynamics between them spurred their discoveries. Quantum mechanics is made accessible to the general reader through key moments in the scientists' careers, such as Marie Curie's discovery of radium, Einstein's theory of relativity, and Niels Bohr's model of the atom, culminating in the race to produce an atomic bomb.
-Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, The Sydney Morning Herald

Highlights the work of Marie Curie, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, and others did together to shake up physics and introduce quantum mechanics, arguing that the field's discovery was a collaborative effort.
-Publishers Weekly