A review by thovsepian
Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley

informative medium-paced

1.0

Maybe a better title for the book would’ve been “physics and philosophy of the Copenhagen interpretation,” but even that is really too narrow. Lindley covers a broad range of topics at a very surface level. It’s hardly sufficient to discuss the science of physicists without including any of the actual science. If this was meant to be a history of their personal lives, fine, but it wasn’t. It was a history of the science and including none. Not a single equation was written besides Einstein’s, and even that wasn’t explained. It read as pop-sci even though Lindley has a PhD in astrophysics, but then I guess it makes sense that he won’t go deep into the theory. I was very excited for this book, but it truly read as an elongated high school essay on the topic. I’m not sure who the intended audience was, but I’m confident it would be well received by eighth grade students. There were many sections that were completely unnecessary for the plot, and all-in-all it seems that Lindley is not the man to cover this topic.