The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics

The Amazing Story Of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Mechanics in Three Easy Steps

The future began twice: in December 1900, and in August 1928. On the first date, at the German Physical Society, Max Planck presented a resolution to something that would come to be called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Planck suggested that atoms can lose energy only in discrete jumps, and this new idea would tip over the first domino in a chain that by the mid-1920s would lead to the development of a new field of physics termed “quantum mechanics.” On the later date, at the end of the summer of 1928, Buck Rogers first appeared in the science fiction pulp Amazing Stories.

With its premier issue published in 1926, Amazing Stories was the first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction stories, or what publisher Hugo Gernsback called “scientifiction.” The magazine’s motto was “Extravagant Fiction Today . . . Cold Fact Tomorrow.” Planck’s breakthrough marked the dawn of a new field of science and is the province of nerds, while the appearance of Buck Rogers began the future as reckoned by geeks. (I should note that as a physics professor who is also an avid fan of science fiction and comic books, I am simultaneously a nerd and a geek.)*

Given the amazing pace of scientific progress at the end of the nineteenth century—the invention of the telegraph,  telephone, and automobile had radically altered notions of distance and time, such that, not for the last time, technology had made the world a somewhat smaller place—it is perhaps not surprising that readers of Amazing Stories in 1928 would expect the eventual development of personal flying harnesses and disintegrator rays.

Buck Rogers’s first adventure was described in Philip Francis Nowlan’s novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., published in that famous issue of Amazing Stories. Anthony Rogers—he would not gain the nickname “Buck” until his appearance in a syndicated newspaper comic strip one year later—was a citizen of both the twentieth and twenty-fifth centuries. Exposure to a gas leak in an abandoned mine near Scranton induced a former army air corps officer to lapse into a form of suspended animation. Upon awakening in the future, he rapidly adjusted to the new age. Nowlan’s hero, catapulted into the future, was just as resourceful as Twain’s Yankee thrust back into King Arthur’s court.

Rogers, armed with the weaponry of tomorrow and a military acumen acquired during his service in World War I, joins a team of rebels fighting against the evil “Hans” invaders from Asia who had conquered America in the early twenty-second century. In fact, many of the stories published in the science fiction pulps of the 1930s and 1940s are distinguished by optimism that in the future there would be continued scientific progress coupled with pessimism that there would be absolutely no improvement whatsoever in international (or interplanetary) relations.

Excerpt from The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios. Published by arrangement with Gotham, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) James Kakalios, 2010.