The course of scientific advancement never runs smoothly, and few fields are as tangled and rocky as theoretical physics. At the turn of the previous century, a group of scientists began to unlock the inner workings of subatomic particles. What they discovered was so confounding and at odds with the classical theory of physics that the struggle to unify both worldviews is still with us today, almost a century later.

Journalist Sheilla Jones’s The Quantum Ten recounts the birth of this conflict. She follows the 10 men, along with the many supporting figures, who created the foundations of modern theoretical physics in the early part of the 20th century. The household names are all here, but Jones also breathes life into a number of other physicists who weren’t covered in your high school science class, yet who were very much a part of the fierce intellectual battle that raged in European scientific circles around the new physics. In Denmark, you had Niels Bohr leading the Copenhagen clique, a group of scientists who became intensely loyal to the fatherly and charming Nobel Prize winner. In Germany, meanwhile, Albert Einstein, the world’s first celebrity scientist, was still toiling largely alone.

But Jones pays particular attention to the intensely likeable and tragic Austrian (later Dutch) scientist Paul Ehrenfest. His home in Leiden, the Netherlands, became a calm port in the middle of a scientific storm, allowing the feuding Einstein and Bohr, as well as many other scientists, to come together.

Jones’s clear-headed prose does a good job of outlining the heady physics that these men theorized, but the strength of her book is in reminding us that physics is more than just experiments or equations on a dusty chalkboard. Many of these men have been mythologized, but in this book they are seen as human – crippled by personal flaws, often ruled by self-interest, and on occasion, brought down by a world not entirely kind to the pursuit of science.