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

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth centuryThe epic true story of how a global team of physics luminaries—Einstein, Curie, Schrodinger, and more—toppled the Newtonian universe amid the turmoil of two World WarsThere 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 Schrodinger, 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 Hurter 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, Hurter reveals these brilliant thinkers anew, as friends and enemies, lovers and loners, and indeed, men and women just like us. Hurter 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.