Not surprising perhaps, given the subject matter: Chapter 2 Physics before Schrodinger; Chapter 4 The First Quantum Revolution, but the writing style did not seem to help.
This problem became plain when I hit the following sentence, in which Gribbin explains a result which Schrodinger first reported in a 1922 paper; even he however, exhausted by illness, bereavement & a heavy teaching load, failed to appreciate its proper significance at the time. Full realisation came in 1926.
“The problem Schrodinger addressed in this second paper of 1922 was the way in which the orbits allowed for an electron in the Bohr model of the atom are quantised.”
I thought that ‘are quantised’ should read ‘to be quantised’ because it went with ‘allowed for’, & it took me more than one to work it out:
“The problem Schrodinger addressed ... was the way in which the orbits … are quantised.”Some internal commas or parentheses would have helped, but looking at the book now with a new eye I see that the modern dislike of commas, so evident in newspapers, now seems to have spread ever wider.
Gribbin also notes that, tucked away at the end of that 1922 paper, is the observation that the equation he had found permits of an imaginary number solution.
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