Chapter 2: Being in Two Places at Once

This chapter took me back to the early days of sophomore chemistry with Niels Henrik David Bohr and his lovely atomic model.

Bohr's model specifies the orbitals that electrons orbit in around the nucleus of the atom. It is in the jumping between these orbitals that photons of light are emitted. The next development in the history of quantum physics came from Heisenberg, whose uncertainty principle continues to baffle me. Essentially, Heisenberg was saying that quantum theory doesn't necessarily correspond with ideas familiar to us.

There have been several points while reading this book that I have had to put it down and take a step back just because the words on these pages are explaining concepts that are so foreign to me, and make me think in such different ways about the world I live in. The conclusion of this chapter presented one of these moments. Cox and Forshaw say that a scientist living in a cave underground, without having ever seen the sun, would have been able to develop the quantum theory. And upon doing this, they could have calculated the "maximum mass of a giant sphere of gas". A scientist named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated the maximum mass of a white dwarf star (the same as the maximum mass of a giant sphere of gas) in 1930 and if you observe the stars today, there is not a single star that's mass exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit. I just think that that is so cool!