Too Big for a Single Mind

Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn’t only revolutionize physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In Too Big for a Single Mind, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines.

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—reminding us of the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it.