A curi­ous thing hap­pened at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the dawn­ing of the 20th. As Euro­pean and Amer­i­can indus­tries became increas­ing­ly con­fi­dent in their meth­ods of inven­tion and pro­duc­tion, sci­en­tists made dis­cov­ery after dis­cov­ery that shook their under­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th cen­tu­ry had thought they would soon describe all known phys­i­cal process­es using the equa­tions of Isaac New­ton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unex­pect­ed obser­va­tions were destroy­ing this rosy out­look.” These obser­va­tions includ­ed X‑rays, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, nuclear radi­a­tion and elec­trons; “lead­ing physi­cists, such as Max Planck and Wal­ter Nernst believed cir­cum­stances were dire enough to war­rant an inter­na­tion­al sym­po­sium that could attempt to resolve the sit­u­a­tion.” Those sci­en­tists could not have known that over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we would still be star­ing at what physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man calls the “Chasm of Igno­rance” at the edge of quan­tum the­o­ry. But they did ini­ti­ate “the quan­tum rev­o­lu­tion” in the first Solvay Coun­cil, in Brus­sels, named for wealthy …