Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jim Al-Khalili (PDF)

Description

From Schrodinger’s cat to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, this book untangles the weirdness of the quantum world.Quantum mechanics underpins modern science and provides us with a blueprint for reality itself. And yet it has been said that if you’re not shocked by it, you don’t understand it. But is quantum physics really so unknowable? Is reality really so strange? And just how can cats be half-alive and half-dead at the same time?Our journey into the quantum begins with nature’s own conjuring trick, in which we discover that atoms — contrary to the rules of everyday experience — can exist in two locations at once. To understand this we travel back to the dawn of the twentieth century and witness the birth of quantum theory, which over the next one hundred years was to overthrow so many of our deeply held notions about the nature of our universe. Scientists and philosophers have been left grappling with its implications every since.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐QUANTUM, A guide for the perplexed is a math free survey of the state of quantum mechanics, QM, note that it was published in 2003. This is not my first foray into the subject as a self-learner. I found AL-Khalili’swriting style to be accessible and easy to follow. Popular science books on QM tend to follow the same path starting with Planck and the ultraviolet catastrophe and ending with the limitations of the standard model. The mathematics of QM is formidable and most of the popular science books avoid any math. Instead these books often dwell on the strange counterintuitive aspects of QM when considered from the viewpoint of everyday experience. Al-Khalili follows the above path but in my opinion he provides a much more detailed and educational explanation of the issues. I noticed that he also made an effort to identify his opinions and to outline alternative ideas. The “math gap” can present a significant barrier to the self-learner. I found this book clarified several questions and sparked my interest in further study. Leonard Susskind’s excellent series, The Theoretical Minimum might be a good starting point.

⭐Is this book for you? Quantum Mechanics, like Relativity, is not so much a difficult subject to understand (if explained well) as much as it is just plain weird. So weird in fact that I would say one may not even want to consider dabbling in the subject unless a reasonable amount of time has been spent with general physics and its history. Learning about the works and history of such illuminaries as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lorentz, Maxwell, Einstein and others can go far in creating a nurturing environment to support the “leap” into the world of Quantum Mechanics. Without this foundation I think this book (or any book on QM) would be pretty difficult to appreciate.With that in mind I think this was one of the most well written, smoothly presented, and comprehensible (and comprehensive) books on Quantum Mechanics I have ever read. The author could be a novelist and applies this talent to presenting this very strange subject in a complete and enjoyable way. After reading this the first time (I plan on reading it again) I walked away feeling like I finally “got” it. Something clicked, finally, and the feeling of satisfaction was enormous. Similar to how I felt when I first felt I finally “got” Special Relativity.I was particularly impressed that the author stepped out on a limb to express his opinion about what a particular quantum outcome might mean with regard to reality and “the meaning of it all”. In addition, his dissection of alternate opinions and theories truly added to the enjoyment and comprehension of the subject matter.One very serious omission in my opinion and the reason I feel this book must be released as a second edition is the fact that almost nothing about the quantum nature of polarizing filters was presented. The bizaarness of polarizers came to a head with the amazing experiments of Paul G. Kwiat and associates demonstrating interaction free measurements. A truly stimulating aspect of QM (For those interested, see […]). In addition Quantum Entanglement experiments rely on polarization measurements so no book on QM is truly complete in my opinion without a discussion of polarizers.For those with a general aptitude for armchair physics, this book truly can’t be beat and it is definitely a “keeper” on my all time favorite science books.

⭐A superb introduction to the subject of quantum physics.Here’s why I love this book: 1. It provided me with a truly informative introduction to the subject of quantum physics. 2. It is exceedingly well written. Sentence structure, topic organization and flow all read as well as the very best of any modern novel. 3. Excellent use of analogies, including discussion of where the analogies break down (as almost all analogies do). 4. Helpful diagrams (for the most part – maybe 10% could have been eliminated). 5. The book is interspersed with many 2-page “asides” (typically, more in-depth discussions of a topic), which helps to break up the book so that it is not quite so monolithic (and encouraged me to keep reading). 6. Importantly (for me), the author makes a point of refreshing the reader’s memory regarding a topic or term if the same has not been used within the last 20 or so pages. 7. Finally, the proof is in the pudding. After reading this book I can describe the concepts of the quantum wavefunction, superposition, entanglement, etc. to my 88 year old mother, and she gets it! The book leaves one with enough information to actually ponder the subject in more detail, but not necessarily looking for more information (although the book does conclude with an excellent suggested reading list, including brief summaries of the suggested readings and their level of difficulty). My only hope is that Dr. Al-Khalili decides to write a follow-up version in the near future that perhaps takes things to the next level mathematically (but short of “Quantum Theory” by David Bohm, which I found to be mathematically overwhelming). Perhaps there is a “quantum leap” between the general concepts introduced in “Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed” and the math of quantum theory as per Bohm’s book, but if there is any middle ground, I’m sure that Dr. Al-Khalili can find it, and can make it approachable for someone with a bit of math background.

⭐I would recommend this book to anyone seeking an introduction to quantum mechanics. I am well read in this area, yet I have learnt some new things, like how the Fourier transform on the wave function gives a mathematical reason for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Khalili doesn’t gloss over the counter-intuitive, not to mention weird, aspects of quantum physics. In fact, he does his best to explain that the ‘quantum world’ is totally consistent within the confines of its mathematical rules whilst defying all attempts to explain its physical manifestations based on our everyday experience.He only includes one equation in the book, for ‘aesthetic reasons’, which he calls ‘the most important equation in physics’: Schrodinger’s equation (John Barrow gives it the same status). Not all physicists agree, like Carlo Rovelli, who argues that the wave function is a fiction and therefore an illusory mathematical tool. Khalili, on the other hand, makes the wave function central to his exposition on virtually all aspects of the subject, whilst acknowledging its existence outside mathematics is not an undisputed fact. However, only a wave function can provide a visual analogue for physical phenomena that are unique to quantum mechanics like superposition and entanglement.

⭐I like this writer and have a few of his books on this subject. I particularly like this book because he writes about the topic in straightforward language that someone at ‘entry level’ can understand and in a non condescending way that doesn’t make me feel ‘thick’ (Grade 2 CSE Maths) because I find it really hard to grasp it all. He then includes an essay on the subject matter by another expert in the field. I read a few pages every night and it certainly gives me something to think about in the period between being wide awake and slumber!

⭐This book lacks a narrative, jumping hither and thither without clear reason. Dr Jim is not a clear communicator – often using twice as many words as necessary to describe things and thus obscuring his fundamental points under haystacks of wordage. You can sense his jaunty personality familiar to me from television, so he has succeeded in that writerly feat, but the content is poorly expressed. E.g. he makes statements about single quantum particles that only apply to them in the statistical plural, which he finally acknowledges a third of the way through; and he fails to distinguish clearly between nonlocality and … that other phenomenon, I don’t owe him enough to look it up. Needs a good editor.

⭐So as the title suggests I was wanting to get into this topic for a while and was looking for books that could explain it in ways thatade sense and provoke me into finding out more and learn in the process. This book certainly helped do that, there were a couple of bits which I felt weren’t perhaps explained the best for my taste, but that is more a problem my side I think than the book or its content. Overall happy with the purchase and I will give it another read to see if that makes a difference to the parts which, as I say, maybe didn’t take root on first pass.

⭐I’d studied quantum mechanics at university nearly 50 years ago so I had a good idea what to expect in terms of the unexpected but Jim Al-Khalili made a better fist of explaining the subject than my chemistry lecturers had done all those years ago – and without delving into advanced maths. This is the third or fourth popular science book on quantum mechanics that I’ve read in recent months and it is by far the best. Jim has done an excellent job of explaining the principles of this complex field and approaches the subject in quite a light hearted way with little injections of humour here and there which make the subject matter feel less remote and the author more human. It is also reassuring that he states several times that no-one really understands what is going on at the quantum level, beyond, that is, what is mathematically calculated or experimentally observed, because it is so divorced from what we experience in the macro world, with most of it being counter-intuitive and bordering on the metaphysical. This repeated reassurance at least means that readers realise they are not alone in puzzling over the deeper significance of quantum physics.The last couple of chapters tried to cover too much ground, in my view, and consequently were less understandable than what had gone before. Many of the points discussed were extremely speculative. Also, when discussing some aspects of molecular biology, Jim seemed to draw a distinction between what he would call a “quantum effect” and what I would refer to as “ordinary chemistry”. All of chemistry is underpinned by quantum mechanics so this distinction appears out of place.Some parts I couldn’t follow, such as the descriptions of superstring theory and M-theory, but I suspect that this is because these topics do require a mathematical approach which is outside the scope of the book. Also, most of the chapters end with a short discourse by a guest author and I found these to be hit and miss, depending, I suppose, on how good each author is in explaining the subject matter to non-physicists. I’m not convinced these sequels added much to the book and it might have been better to have omitted them.But, overall, this is an excellent book, providing a first-rate, non-mathematical introduction to the quantum world.

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