Beyond uncertainty: Heisenberg, quantum physics, and the bomb

Abstract

Exhaustively detailed yet eminently readable, this is important book.Publishers Weekly, starred review does not so much exculpate Heisenberg as explain him, with a transparency that makes this biography a pleasure to read.Los Angeles Times Well crafted and readable ...[Cassidy] provides a nuanced and compelling account of Heisenberg's life.The Harvard Book Review In 1992, David C. Cassidy's groundbreaking biography of Werner Heisenberg, Uncertainty, was published to resounding acclaim from scholars and critics. Michael Frayn, in Playbill of Broadway production of Copenhagen, referred to it as one of his main sources and the standard work in English. Richard Rhodes (The Making of Atom Bomb) called it the definitive biography of a great and tragic physicist, and Los Angeles Times praised it as an important book. Cassidy has sifted record and brilliantly detailed Heisenberg's actions. No book that has appeared since has rivaled Uncertainty, now out of print, for its depth and rich detail of life, times, and science of this brilliant and controversial figure of twentieth-century physics. Since fall of Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Heisenberg's role in Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within context of his vast research and tackles vexing questions of a scientist's personal responsibility and guilt when serving abhorrent military regime. David C. Cassidy is author of J. Robert Oppenheimer and American Century, Einstein and Our World, and Uncertainty.