Those who wish to learn the back-story find it afterward in historical treatments of the era. The human element of the struggle to formulate quantum mechanics-indeed to amend the very basis of reality-is largely omitted from the curriculum. As taught in the classroom (at least to me), each of these names is a sterile label attached to a particular equation, principle, or model. This other-world of arcane rules and illogical phenomena was first mapped out during the 1920s by a roster of noted physicists, among them Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac. The subject seemed-and still seems to a certain extent-frustratingly abstract, a compilation of methods and explanations so utterly disconnected from my own realm of experience that I accept them largely on faith. As an astronomy teacher and a science writer, I rarely need to call upon what I learned in my long-ago college quantum mechanics course.
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