Faust in Copenhagen

This book, Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segrè, looks very interesting. I read a review from the UK Telegraph written by Kenan Malik, a British lecturer, writer and broadcaster, with a background in neurobiology and history of science.

Malik critiques Segrè for not paying enough attention to the physics of quantum mechanics:

What interests Segrè is the context of scientific discovery, both personal and cultural. This is both the strength and the weakness of his book.

I don't see that this has to be a weakness. I haven't read much about quantum mechanics, but surely there are already books around which deal with the physics in detail. What's wrong with a book that deals more with the personalities involved, and the cultural context? It sounds like Segrè has a fascinating thesis:

Quantum mechanics, he suggests, was part of a broader development in which modernism overthrew classical concepts. Quantum theories resulted from the same kind of 'wild experimenting' that also produced James Joyce's Ulysses, Schoenberg's atonalism and Giorgio de Chirico's landscapes. In all these cases 'the outer world, carefully described for hundreds of years, did not seem to match the inner world that was being uncovered'.

Malik does not agree, however:

The strangeness of quantum mechanics is, however, not a reflection of the cultural context in which the theories developed - it is simply a reflection of the fact that the subatomic world is indeed a strange place... If, as Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe, it's not because he hasn't read Ulysses.

I'm open to sociological treatments of science - not, perhaps, as a replacement for discussing the "science" or the "physics", but as a complementary viewpoint. Obviously, if quantum mechanics is an accurate depiction and explanation of the sub-atomic universe, it wasn't the culture of the early 20th-century that made the universe this way. However, the surrounding culture may have given the scientists involved the conceptual tools with which to understand the sub-atomic world.

I think this book would make a nice addition to my library and I'm looking forward to reading it. Shame about that pesky PhD...