Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A history in 40 moments goes from Max Planck to Richard Feynman in discrete quanta
THE history of quantum physics is nothing if not momentous. No one present on 14 December 1900, when Max Planck first presented the idea of tiny, discrete “quanta” of energy to a meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin, envisaged how the concept would come to define physics in the century that followed. Planck even said it was a “purely formal assumption”, needed solely to tidy up embarrassing inconsistencies in the classical description of how objects absorb and emit…
