You can blame this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics winners when you find yourself having to shop for a quantum computer. Scientists Serge Haroche and David Wineland were honored in Stockholm last week for harnessing delicate and elusive quantum particles -- the wildly behaved atoms, electrons, and compellingly named elementary bits like quarks, leptons, and bosons that underlie the far more regular makeup of the objects we know and love -- and getting them to behave in ways that render them useful in a superatomic world. Controllable quantum particles will bring us quicker computers, more precise time-telling, and cryptographic methods that will first blow all current encryption to pieces, then enable far tighter digital protection, making super-fast quantum computers both a necessity and a sure bet (in which the CIA and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have already begun investing).

It makes sense to think of our world as a collection of surfaces, smooth versions of the erratic and unpredictable quantum scene inside. Quantum particles behave in ways that can be counted on only in terms of probability. They hurl themselves throughout space and time, moving faster than the largely predictable outside world. One particle can seemingly affect another from miles away, and two can occupy the exact same spot at the exact same moment. In their natural environment, these particles’ frenetic activity and disregard for classic notions of distance and position reveal the crawling pace of even our fastest computers, but they’ve traditionally remained resistant to translation into the outside world, losing their quantum properties upon arrival. Haroche and Wineland have each come up with methods that bring them to us intact, out of a theoretical and esoteric existence and into the fledgling practicality of quantum computing.

Quantum theory was brought to public attention in 1918, when German theoretical physicist Max Planck was awarded a Nobel prize for originating it. Within a decade, tensions between the quantum and the classic worlds abounded, via statements that held true in one and negated the existence of the other. The century of physics history that's led to Haroche and Wineland bridging the classic-quantum gap is filled with unimaginably imaginative minds, including New York City’s populist physicist Richard Feynman, hero to nerds and cat-lovers alike, Erwin Schrödinger, and key quantum names like Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. The following four titles are the tales of how they got us here.

"Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick

While Richard Feynman’s contributions to the field of quantum physics include keystone moments of extending rules of classic physics to quantum states and introducing the notions of quantum computing and nanotechnology, his popularity is an equally important part of his legacy. His flair for showmanship and ability to turn complex details into clear and streamlined presentations garnered him an audience of laypeople that numbers in the tens of thousands to this day. Gleick’s probing biography is a worthy accompaniment to Feynman’s long list of autobiographies -- a less personal take on Feynman’s life that looks straight through his theatrical personality and directly into the individual at work, beginning with a history of quantum physics from its beginning.

“The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science” by J. L. Heilbron

At the end of the nineteenth century, Max Planck formulated his now-famous “constant," tying the energy of a photon to the frequency of its wave, and launching the world of quantum physics. Heilbron’s biography is a personally tender treatment of Planck, who refused to leave his beloved Germany despite deep moral opposition to the rising fascist party. Working under the Third Reich, Planck mounted the best defense he could build: a nonbudging scientific community in the face of Hitler's reign. Heilbron’s savvy coverage of Planck’s insistence on living as a scientific, intellectual, and moral citizen won the 1988 History of Science Society prize for furthering public understanding of science’s inner workings.

"What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches" by Erwin Schrödinger

Winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, Schrödinger also nursed a more private love for biology: this now-classic look at the foundations of life was written for non-scientists but the rigorously scientific views of nature within inadvertently created the field of molecular biology. Reissued this year, this edition of “What Is Life?” includes autobiographic material, giving insight into what one of the pioneers of quantum physics was thinking about the world he was helping to create.

"The Quantum Ten: The Development of Quantum Physics" by Sheilla Jones

In late October 1927, the top ten quantum players, including Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, and Erwin Schrödinger, joined nineteen fellow scientists at the art deco Institut de Physiolgie in Brussels to hammer out the newly forming field of quantum physics. Riding on strong, fiercely diverse personalities and powerful intellects, participants (Marie Curie among them) of the Fifth Solvay Conference were tasked with unifying three decades of wildly innovative thinking into a new physics, the workings and meaning of which no one yet understood. Jones showcases the politics, drama and science of the week quantum physics was built, with just the right dose of technical background.