The Man Who Broke Reality: Niels Bohr and the Making of Modern Physics

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‘A true tour de force. A fresh, authoritative, meticulously researched and utterly engaging examination of arguably the deepest thinker of the twentieth century’ Jim Al Khalili’Philip Ball is a terrific writer’ Adam Rutherford, GuardianDanish physicist Niels Bohr was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for his revolutionary contribution to quantum theory. He was engaged in a lifelong intellectual duel with Einstein – and modern experiments have vindicated his view. During the Second World War, he debated with Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen about his former student’s work on the Nazi atomic bomb. He escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark and was welcomed by Robert Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb. He campaigned tirelessly for international arms control during the Cold War. He was a prime mover behind the establishment of CERN, the centre for nuclear physics in Switzerland. The Man Who Broke Reality, by acclaimed science writer Philip Ball, is a compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most inventive and iconoclastic thinkers – a scientist whose insights continue to shape our understanding of the universe and our place within it.