Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were friends and comrades-in-arms against what they considered the most preposterous aspect of quantum mechanics: its randomness. Although Einstein’s own work provided early insights into quantum mechanics, he nevertheless refused to believe that God played dice with the universe. Schrödinger, too, rebelled at the indeterminate nature of the universe that his own work had revealed, and constructed a fable of a cat that was neither alive nor dead to highlight the apparent absurdity of a theory gone wrong. In Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat, physicist Paul Halpern tells the story of how Einstein and Schrödinger searched, first as collaborators and then as competitors, for a Grand Unified Theory that would eliminate quantum weirdness and make the universe seem sensible again. This story of their quest-which ultimately failed-provides readers with new insights into the history of physics and the lives and work of two scientists whose obsessions drove its progress.
