IST Press published the book “Mecânica Quântica. A Maior Aventura Intelectual do Século XX”‚ by Luís Alcácer and Alfredo Barbosa Henriques.

The user presses a few keys on his/her mobile phone and, almost instantly, he/she talks to his friend in Australia. You open your personal computer, read the New York Times online, and buy a ticket for a Broadway show in a month’s time, when you’re in New York. And you have no idea how it all happens! You haven’t even thought about it!

This is possible thanks to technologies based on the theory known as quantum mechanics, or quantum theory. Quantum mechanics began as the branch of physics that explains the atomic and subatomic world, but its scope now extends to cosmology and gravitation, and the origin of the Universe itself.

This short book describes, without recourse to mathematical formalism, the ideas, controversies and interesting episodes that lie at the origin of the creation and development of quantum theory, which had their greatest creative expression in the “roaring twenties”, probably constituting “the greatest intellectual adventure of the last century, and also one of the most international”.

The book is available at IST Press online store and in bookstores Almedina, Bertrand, Fnac, Wook, etc.