Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different by Philip Ball (PDF)

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“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Ball’s gorgeously lucid text takes us to the edge of contemporary theorizing about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Beyond Weird is easily the best book I’ve read on the subject.” — Washington Post“[A] clear and deeply researched account of what’s known about the quantum laws of nature, and how to think about what they might really mean.” ― Nature”The intention of Beyond Weird, though, is not simply to provide a dummy’s guide to the theory, but to explore its underlying meaning. We know that the equations work, but what sort of world do they really represent? To tackle the question, he weighs up the competing interpretations, and the misconceptions, that have attached themselves to quantum theory in its 100-year history, finishing with more recent attempts to rebuild the theory ‘from scratch’, and new ideas that offer tantalising glimpses beyond. . . . [A] laudable achievement.” ― Sunday Times“An excellent account of modern quantum theory and the efforts being made to harness its effects.” ― The Spectator“It would be easy to think ‘Surely we don’t need another book on quantum physics.’ There are loads of them. . . . Don’t be fooled, though – because in Beyond Weird, Philip Ball has done something rare in my experience. . .it makes an attempt not to describe quantum physics, but to explain why it is the way it is.” ― PopScience Books”If so great a physicist as Richard Feynman once claimed that ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics,’ what hope do we laypeople have? Luckily, Philip Ball, a freelance writer (formerly of Nature magazine) who has published widely on the history of science, tackles the subject in a user-friendly yet thorough introduction. . . . Replacing ‘obscure terminology’ with accessible ideas and drawings, Ball makes would-be physicists of us all.” ― Foreword Review”Ball . . . asks lots of questions, including rhetorical ones, and uses words like ‘we’ and ‘let’s’ to turn readers into collaborators. The tone is reassuring; he never talks down to nonscientists. Instead, he invites them to join in exploring this ‘new and unfamiliar logic’ in which what we understand and how we measure something has an effect on what we observe. Replacing ‘obscure terminology’ with accessible ideas and drawings, Ball makes would-be physicists of us all.” ― Foreword Reviews”Philip Ball is one of the finest contemporary writers about science. . . . His prose is a pleasure to read.” ― Wall Street Journal”This is the book on quantum mechanics that I wish I’d written, but I’m really glad I read. Philip Ball really encapsulates the sheer mystery of quantum mechanics so well.” — Jim Al-Khalili ― BBC Science Focus Review “This is the clearest and most insightful description of quantum enigmas that I have ever read. I kept being astonished at how Ball seemed to make one mystery after another vanish. He makes quantum mysteries disappear without removing their uncanniness. Brilliant and innovative, Beyond Weird may alter how quantum mechanics is taught not only to the public but also to physicists. I suspect that teachers of introductory quantum mechanics will be paraphrasing or outright quoting this book for decades.” — Robert P. Crease, coauthor of The Quantum Moment About the Author Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He lives in London. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Beyond WeirdWhy Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics is DifferentBy Philip BallThe University of Chicago PressCopyright © 2018 Philip BallAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-226-55838-7CHAPTER 1No one can say whatquantum mechanics means (and this is a book about it)Richard Feynman said that in 1965. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his work on quantum mechanics.In case we didn’t get the point, Feynman drove it home in his artful Everyman style. ‘I was born not understanding quantum mechanics,’ he exclaimed merrily, ‘[and] I still don’t understand quantum mechanics!’ Here was the man who had just been anointed one of the foremost experts on the topic, declaring his ignorance of it.What hope was there, then, for the rest of us?Feynman’s much-quoted words help to seal the reputation of quantum mechanics as one of the most obscure and difficult subjects in all of science. Quantum mechanics has become symbolic of ‘impenetrable science’, in the same way that the name of Albert Einstein (who played a key role in its inception) acts as shorthand for scientific genius.Feynman clearly didn’t mean that he couldn’t do quantum theory. He meant that this was all he could do. He could work through the math just fine – he invented some of it, after all. That wasn’t the problem. Sure, there’s no point in pretending that the math is easy, and if you never got on with numbers then a career in quantum mechanics isn’t for you. But neither, in that case, would be a career in fluid mechanics, population dynamics, or economics, which are equally inscrutable to the numerically challenged.No, the equations aren’t why quantum mechanics is perceived to be so hard. It’s the ideas. We just can’t get our heads around them. Neither could Richard Feynman.His failure, Feynman admitted, was to understand what the math was saying. It provided numbers: predictions of quantities that could be tested against experiments, and which invariably survived those tests. But Feynman couldn’t figure out what these numbers and equations were really about: what they said about the ‘real world’.One view is that they don’t say anything about the ‘real world’. They’re just fantastically useful machinery, a kind of black box that we can use, very reliably, to do science and engineering. Another view is that the notion of a ‘real world’ beyond the math is meaningless, and we shouldn’t waste our time thinking about it. Or perhaps we haven’t yet found the right math to answer questions about the world it purports to describe. Or maybe, it’s sometimes said, the math tells us that ‘everything that can happen does happen’ – whatever that means.This is a book about what quantum math really means. Happily, we can explore that question without having to look very deeply into the math itself. Even what little I’ve included here can, if you prefer, be gingerly set aside.I am not saying that this book is going to give you the answer. We don’t have an answer. (Some people do have an answer, but only in the sense that some people have the Bible: their truth rests on faith, not proof.) We do, however, now have better questions than we did when Feynman admitted his ignorance, and that counts for a lot.What we can say is that the narrative of quantum mechanics – at least among those who think most deeply about its meaning – has changed in remarkable ways since the end of the twentieth century. Quantum theory has revolutionized our concept of atoms, molecules, light and their interactions, but that transformation didn’t happen abruptly and in some ways it is still happening now. It began in the early 1900s and it had a workable set of equations and ideas by the late 1920s. Only since the 1960s, however, have we begun to glimpse what is most fundamental and important about the theory, and some of the crucial experiments have been feasible only from the 1980s. Several of them have been performed in the twenty-first century. Even today we are still trying to get to grips with the central ideas, and are still testing their limits. If what we truly want is a theory that is well understood rather than simply one that does a good job at calculating numbers, then we still don’t really have a quantum theory.This book aims to give a sense of the current best guesses about what that real quantum theory might look like, if it existed. It rather seems as though such a theory would unsettle most if not all we take for granted about the deep fabric of the world, which appears to be a far stranger and more challenging place than we had previously envisaged. It is not a place where different physical rules apply, so much as a place where we are forced to rethink our ideas about what we mean by a physical world and what we think we are doing when we attempt to find out about it.In surveying these new perspectives, I want to insist on two things that have emerged from the modern renaissance – the word is fully warranted – in investigations of the foundations of quantum mechanics.First, what is all too frequently described as the weirdness of quantum physics is not a true oddity of the quantum world but comes from our (understandably) contorted attempts to find pictures for visualizing it or stories to tell about it. Quantum physics defies intuition, but we do it an injustice by calling that circumstance ‘weird’.Second – and worse – this ‘weirdness’ trope, so nonchalantly paraded in popular and even technical accounts of quantum theory, actively obscures rather than expresses what is truly revolutionary about it.Quantum mechanics is in a certain sense not hard at all. It is baffling and surprising, and right now you could say that it remains cognitively impenetrable. But that doesn’t mean it is hard in the way that car maintenance or learning Chinese is hard (I speak with bitter experience of both). Plenty of scientists find the theory easy enough to accept and master and use.Rather than insisting on its difficulty, we might better regard it as a beguiling, maddening, even amusing gauntlet thrown down to challenge the imagination.For that is indeed what is challenged. I suspect we are, in the wider cultural context, finally beginning to appreciate this. Artists, writers, poets and playwrights have started to imbibe and deploy ideas from quantum physics: see, for instance, plays such as Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and novels such as Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. We can argue about how accurately or aptly these writers appropriate the scientific ideas, but it is right that there should be imaginative responses to quantum mechanics, because it is quite possible that only an imagination sufficiently broad and liberated will come close to articulating what it is about.There’s no doubt that the world described by quantum mechanics defies our intuitions. But ‘weird’ is not a particularly useful way to talk about it, since that world is also our world. We now have a fairly good, albeit still incomplete, account of how the world familiar to us, with objects having well-defined properties and positions that don’t depend on how we choose to measure them, emerges from the quantum world. This ‘classical’ world is, in other words, a special case of quantum theory, not something distinct from it. If anything deserves to be called weird, it is us.* * *Here are the most common reasons for calling quantum mechanics weird. We’re told it says that:• Quantum objects can be both waves and particles. This is wave-particle duality.• Quantum objects can be in more than one state at once: they can be both here and there, say. This is called superposition.• You can’t simultaneously know exactly two properties of a quantum object. This is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.• Quantum objects can affect one another instantly over huge distances: so-called ‘spooky action at a distance’. This arises from the phenomenon called entanglement.• You can’t measure anything without disturbing it, so the human observer can’t be excluded from the theory: it becomes unavoidably subjective.• Everything that can possibly happen does happen. There are two separate reasons for this claim. One is rooted in the (uncontroversial) theory called quantum electrodynamics that Feynman and others formulated. The other comes from the (extremely controversial) ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics.Yet quantum mechanics says none of these things. In fact, quantum mechanics doesn’t say anything about ‘how things are’. It tells us what to expect when we conduct particular experiments. All of the claims above are nothing but interpretations laid on top of the theory. I will ask to what extent they are good interpretations (and try to give at least a flavour of what ‘interpretation’ might mean) – but I will say right now that none of them is a very good interpretation and some are highly misleading.The question is whether we can do any better. Regardless of the answer, we are surely being fed too narrow and too stale a diet. The conventional catalogue of images, metaphors and ‘explanations’ is not only clichéd but risks masking how profoundly quantum mechanics confounds our expectations.It’s understandable that this is so. We can hardly talk about quantum theory at all unless we find stories to tell about it: metaphors that offer the mind purchase on such slippery ground. But too often these stories and metaphors are then mistaken for the way things are. The reason we can express them at all is that they are couched in terms of the quotidian: the quantum rules are shoehorned into the familiar concepts of our everyday world. But that is precisely where they no longer seem to fit.* * *It’s very peculiar that a scientific theory should demand interpretation at all. Usually in science, theory and interpretation go together in a relatively transparent way. Certainly a theory might have implications that are not obvious and need spelling out, but the basic meaning is apparent at once.Take Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The objects to which it refers – organisms and species – are relatively unambiguous (if actually a little challenging to make precise), and it’s clear what the theory says about how they evolve. This evolution depends on two ingredients: random, inheritable mutations in traits; and competition for limited resources that gives a reproductive advantage to individuals with certain variants of a trait. How this idea plays out in practice – how it translates to the genetic level, how it is affected by different population sizes or different mutation rates, and so on – is really rather complex, and even now not all of it is fully worked out. But we don’t struggle to understand what the theory means. We can write down the ingredients and implications of the theory in everyday words, and there is nothing more that needs to be said.Feynman seemed to feel that it was impossible and even pointless to attempt anything comparable for quantum mechanics:We can’t pretend to understand it since it affronts all our commonsense notions. The best we can do is to describe what happens in mathematics, in equations, and that’s very difficult. What is even harder is trying to decide what the equations mean. That’s the hardest thing of all.Most users don’t worry too much about these puzzles. In the words of the physicist David Mermin of Cornell University, they ‘shut up and calculate’. For many decades quantum theory was regarded primarily as a mathematical description of phenomenal accuracy and reliability, capable of explaining the shapes and behaviours of molecules, the workings of electronic transistors, the colours of nature and the laws of optics, and a whole lot else. It would be routinely described as ‘the theory of the atomic world’: an account of what the world is like at the tiniest scales we can access with microscopes.Talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics was, on the other hand, a parlour game suitable only for grandees in the twilight of their career, or idle discussion over a beer. Or worse: only a few decades ago, professing a serious interest in the topic could be tantamount to career suicide for a young physicist. Only a handful of scientists and philosophers, idiosyncratically if not plain crankily, insisted on caring about the answer. Many researchers would shrug or roll their eyes when the ‘meaning’ of quantum mechanics came up; some still do. ‘Ah, nobody understands it anyway!’How different this is from the attitude of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and their contemporaries, for whom grappling with the apparent oddness of the theory became almost an obsession. For them, the meaning mattered intensely. In 1998 the American physicist John Wheeler, a pioneer of modern quantum theory, lamented the loss of the ‘desperate puzzlement’ that was in the air in the 1930s. ‘I want to recapture that feeling for all, even if it is my last act on Earth’, Wheeler said.Wheeler may indeed have had some considerable influence in making this deviant tendency become permissible again, even fashionable. The discussion of options and interpretations and meanings may no longer have to remain a matter of personal preference or abstract philosophizing, and if we can’t say what quantum mechanics means, we can now at least say more clearly and precisely what it does not mean.This re-engagement with ‘quantum meaning’ comes partly because we can now do experiments to probe foundational issues that were previously expressed as mere thought experiments and considered to be on the border of metaphysics: a mode of thinking that, for better or worse, many scientists disdain. We can now put quantum paradoxes and puzzles to the test – including the most famous of them all, Schrödinger’s cat.These experiments are among the most ingenious ever devised. Often they can be done on a benchtop with relatively inexpensive equipment – lasers, lenses, mirrors – yet they are extraordinary feats to equal anything in the realm of Big Science. They involve capturing and manipulating atoms, electrons or packets of light, perhaps one at a time, and subjecting them to the most precise examination. Some experiments are done in outer space to avoid the complications introduced by gravity. Some are done at temperatures colder than the void between the stars. They might create completely new states of matter. They enable a kind of ‘teleportation’; they challenge Werner Heisenberg’s view of uncertainty; they suggest that causation can flow both forwards and backwards in time or be scrambled entirely. They are beginning to peel back the veil and show us what, if anything, lies beneath the blandly reassuring yet mercurial equations of quantum mechanics.Such work is already winning Nobel Prizes, and will win more. What it tells us above all else is very clear: the apparent oddness, the paradoxes and puzzles of quantum mechanics, are real. We cannot hope to understand how the world is made up unless we grapple with them.Perhaps most excitingly of all, because we can now do experiments that exploit quantum effects to make possible what sounds as though it should be impossible, we can put those tricks to work. We are inventing quantum technologies that can manipulate information in unprecedented ways, transmit secure information that cannot be read surreptitiously by eavesdroppers, or perform calculations that are far beyond the reach of ordinary computers. In this way more than any other, we will all soon have to confront the fact that quantum mechanics is not some weirdness buried in remote, invisible aspects of the world, but is our current best shot at uncovering the laws of nature, with consequences that happen right in front of us.What has emerged most strongly from this work on the fundamental aspects of quantum theory over the past decade or two is that it is not a theory about particles and waves, discreteness or uncertainty or fuzziness. It is a theory about information. This new perspective gives the theory a far more profound prospect than do pictures of ‘things behaving weirdly’. Quantum mechanics seems to be about what we can reasonably call a view of reality. More even than a question of ‘what can and can’t be known’, it asks what a theory of knowability can look like. (Continues…)Excerpted from Beyond Weird by Philip Ball. Copyright © 2018 Philip Ball. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

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

⭐Philip Ball is a British science writer, as well as an editor and contributor to the journal ‘Nature.’ He also writes a regular column in ‘Chemistry World.’He wrote in the first chapter of this 2018 book, “‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Richard Feynman said that in 1965… the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his work on quantum mechanics… What hope was there, then, for the rest of us? … Feynman clearly didn’t mean that he couldn’t DO quantum theory. He meant that this was ALL he could do… No, the equations aren’t why quantum mechanics is perceived to be so hard. It’s the ideas. We just can’t get our heads around them. Neither could Richard Feynman. His failure, Feynman admitted, was to understand that the math was saying… Feynman couldn’t figure out what these numbers and equations were really about: what they said about the ‘real world.’” (Pg. 6-7)He continues, “This is a book about what quantum math really means… I am not saying that this book is going to give you the answer. We don’t have an answer… We do, however, now have better questions than we did when Feynman admitted his ignorance, and that counts for a lot… This book aims to give a sense of the current best guesses about what that REAL quantum theory might look like, if it existed.” (Pg. 8-9)He acknowledges, “Yet there is not guarantee, nor indeed much likelihood, that future experiments are going to strip away all the counter-intuitive aspects of quantum theory and reveal something as concrete, ‘commonsensical’ and satisfying as the old-style classical physics, Indeed, it is possible that we might NEVER be able to say what quantum theory really ‘means.’ … It might be, then, that all we can ever do is shut up and calculate, and dismiss the rest as a matter of taste. But I think we can do better, and that we should at least aspire to.” (Pg. 20-21)He observes, “the most fundamental message of quantum theory isn’t a purely mathematical one. Some physicists might be tempted to argue precisely the opposite: that the math IS the most fundamental description. They might say this basically because the math makes perfect sense whereas the words don’t quite. But that would be to make a semantic error: equations purportedly about physical reality are, without interpretation, just marks on paper. We can’t hide behind equations… not if we truly want to derive MEANING.” (Pg. 34)He explains, “it’s sometimes said that quantum electrodynamics really does show that an electron or a photon goes through both slits is the double-slit experiment—because it takes very path ‘at once.’ However, this picture is just a METAPHOR for the mathematics… The electron or a photon does not take all possible paths. To imagine that it does is not just mistaken: it is fundamentally the wrong way to think about quantum mechanics.” (Pg. 75)He acknowledges, “We know that measurements of a quantum system SEEM to collapse the wavefunction. We most certainly DON’T know how, or why, or indeed IF that actually happens. This virtue is also the weakness of the Copenhagen Interpretation It prohibits further probing, and so leaves wavefunction collapse a mystery—and moreover, one to which we can admit no solution even in principle. The Copenhagen view is consistent, certainly—but it’s not hard to be consistent if you refuse to entertain awkward questions. It is entirely understandable that some see Bohr’s doctrine as a counsel of despair, or alternatively as a cheap cop-out. It demands that, at the moment of measurement, we accept that the universe does something not really distinct from magic.” (Pg. 107)He argues, “At face value, quantum mechanics insists that a superposition of live and dead states should then be possible. Some researchers today are happy to accept that: to assume that there need be nothing so absurd about live/dead cats. They don’t feel obliged… to regard such a surreal prospect as inherently absurd. In truth, the question has little real meaning unless we can define ‘live’ and ‘dead’ in quantum terms … And it’s simply not clear how to do that—it’s not a sufficiently well-defined scenario. Arguably we should let the matter drop there.” (Pg. 240)Of Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ (MWI), he comments, “What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we THINK that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value—any meaning—in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.” (Pg. 302-303) He continues, “If indeed the MWI were a consistent and coherent interpretation of quantum mechanics … we would be well advised to take it. But it is, sadly, not that. Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do any of its rivals. It tells you not to trust empiricism at all: rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be.” (Pg. 304-305)He concludes, “Where we still struggle is in deciding what degree of reality, if any to attribute to the Ifs of quantum mechanics. But perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up on that… One of the most immediate and pressing questions now is to understand why the quantum Ifness has the particular character it does, and not some other… At any rate, it’s vital that we understand this ifness doesn’t imply that the world—OUR world, our home—isn’t holding anything back from us. It’s just that classical physics has primed us to expect too much from it. We have become accustomed to asking questions and getting definite answers… That won’t do any more. Nature does its best, and we need to adjust our expectations. It is time to go beyond weird.” (Pg. 353-354)This is a very well-written survey of many aspects of quantum theory, that will be of great interest to those studying the subject.

⭐This is a review of the Kindle edition of “Beyond Weird”, the format was easy to read.The book comes with a comprehensive bibliography which appears to be useful. It also has a good index.I imagine that the book will appeal to students and educated laymen alike.I found it absorbing and interesting. Hence the 5 stars. I will be rereading it and following up on some items in the bibliography.Firstly, this is not about how quantum mechanics is weirder than you ever thought. If you don’t know quantum mechanics (QM) is weird, it would be a good idea to introduce yourself to the history of the subject; you will see why It has this reputation.Neither is this a book from which you might teach yourself QM. You should seek out another if that is what you need. The book contains no mathematics or equations. It is an ideas book in which Ball provides the reader with an excellent account of the state of play as of 2018. I use the words “complex Hilbert space” in a quote from the book below. It is neither necessary to know what a complex Hilbert space is to read the book (or understand my review!) nor is it the case that if you know what this is then the book is a waste of time for you.Bohr and Einstein could not agree on what, if any reality underlay QM. It may be tempting (justifiably so) to give up, abandon further inquiry and dismiss QM as “weird”. After all, it remains true that attending “any meeting about the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics is like being in a holy city in great tumult. You will find all the religions with all their priests pitted in holy war”. The priests agree on the foundational scriptures, but they diverge on the interpretation. The experts are not of one mind. Ball invites us to go “Beyond” our concern with weirdness and bring ourselves up to date with current thinking about what the theory means. What underlying reality if any, does Schrödinger’s equation describe or even hint at?Paradoxes which have illuminated difficulties with the subject have been with us for many years. Schrödinger’s Cat (is it, could it be, both dead and alive?) and the EPR paradox (does “quantum entanglement” entail instantaneous action at a distance, breaking relativity?) are amongst the conceptually difficult ideas tackled here.Interpretations of QM are explained and evaluated. We are taken through Bohr’s (the Schrödinger equation tells us all that can be known) Everett and Deutsch’s (many worlds interpretation), Qbism (an even stronger reliance Schrödinger than Bohr) and others. Currently, attempts are being made to find satisfying axiomatic foundations; some are described here. The motivation behind this can be appreciated if we compare an example of a “standard” set for QM like:“1. For every system there is a complex Hilbert space H.2. States of the system correspond to projection operators onto H.3. Those things that are observable somehow correspond to the eigenprojectors of Hermitian operators.4. Isolated systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.”with the laws of motion underlying Newtonian mechanics:“1. Every object keeps moving at the same speed if no force is applied to it. If it is still to begin with, it stays still.2. If a force is applied to an object, it accelerates in direct proportion to that force, and in the direction of that force.”3. For every force that one body exerts on another, the other body exerts an equal force back in the opposite direction.”Ball points out that given the difference in the language in the two sets of axioms, it is not surprising that there is a push for a quantum reconstruction.He describes an informational approach to QM and why it is seen as potentially fruitful given the peculiarities and limitations of types of information available from quantum systems.I get the impression that the informational approach is his favourite. A substantial minority of practitioners in the field still favour Bohr’s view. Ball is harshest with the many worlds interpretation.To repeat, I found this to be an excellent survey which has equiped me to venture deeper into the alleyways of that tumultuous city, listen to the priests and perhaps form an opinion of my own on the merits of their competing interpretations.

⭐”Beyond Weird”, despite its cheesy title, makes a good impression from the very start. Ball is an engaging writer who knows his stuff and doesn’t patronise the reader. It’s like he’s talking to a curious colleague who uses quantum theory (a chemist or applied physicist, for example) but doesn’t research it. The tone would work well for a recent physics graduate or someone in the final stages of their QM course.The problem with quantum mechanics is that the mathematics makes plenty of sense in itself (Schrödinger’s equation and its many solutions in concrete circumstances such as the structure and behaviour of the hydrogen atom, for example) but the many constructs of the theoretical apparatus don’t align with any compelling concept of ‘reality’. To properly engage with the ‘interpretation problem’ you have to understand the maths, which means taking a course first.Before I studied quantum mechanics (with the Open University – SM358) I thought I had a grasp – as an educated person with a technical background – of quantum theory, at least at a conceptual level. I knew, or thought I knew, about the uncertainty principle, the wave function and its collapse, the double slit experiment and its paradoxical interpretation and so on.I spent the first third of my QM course learning a lot of details about Schrödinger’s equation in its time dependent and stationary forms, about spin spaces, kets, operators, expansions in terms of eigenfunctions, Hilbert spaces and so on. I was internalising this complex apparatus and making it work and I couldn’t anchor any of it into the real world. I was confused, baffled, a sufferer from extreme cognitive dissonance. It was not pleasant.Eventually I managed to organise all this stuff into something which kind of made internal sense, and kept reminding myself that in the end its only function was to produce a number between zero and one as regards observable outcomes. I had become acculturated, but I still didn’t know what any of it really told me about reality.And I think that only after this ‘preparation’ is a reader really able to engage profitably with Philip Ball’s book.Ball is good on superpositions and what it would mean if they were observable. He’s as good as you could expect on decoherence and einselection, although it would have been useful to have a more explanatory appendix (perhaps that’s more a signifier for my own lack of clarity). He is also good at debunking some of the more ontological-realist views of the wavefunction. There are also clear accounts of Bell’s theorem and quantum computing.And then it starts to unravel. Ball clearly has a thing about the many-worlds interpretation (which has a stronghold at his alma mater, Oxford). His customary cool deserts him for visceral distaste. His debunking is anticlimactic, however, depending on philosophical sophistry about identity-continuity before and after ‘splitting’ of worlds. The MWI does not hang on such arguments.In the final chapters things get worse. Ball’s enthusiasm for ‘it from bit’, an information-centric approach to the interpretation problem, gets the better of him. Unfortunately the ideas swirling around in this currently active area of investigation are even more formless and confusing than the more conventional ideas he’s been debunking all along. We finish the book shaking our heads and asking, ‘What was that about?’.If you read one book on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and you have studied QM as an undergraduate, this may well be the book for you. It will confirm that you were right to be concerned that the Copenhagen stuff you were taught does not put an end to the discussion, and it will straighten out and firm up many of your questions and half-formed, tentative conclusions.Just don’t think it will give you any final answers: there are none.

⭐I’d hoped to get some understanding of the underlying truths of quantum mechanics. As a mere physics first, and even once able to solve Schrodinger’s equation, but never really understanding what it was about, I hoped. But after reading this book I’m none the wiser. It seems there are no underlying truths but just a wealth of opinion; even the Equation itself was an educated guess…that happens to work. This book seems aptly summed up in a quotation from the author himself; he was in fact criticising the many-worlds hypothesis but it applies to the book as a whole: `it…denies language but gets away with it because language has a notorious capacity to express things that appear to have meaning yet do not’…decoherence, Shrodinger’s kittens, contextuality, entanglement, measurement, information…etc.One specific thing that would have made it easier to follow the arguments would have been a summary at the end of each chapter. It’s well-enough written but I found I was being swept along with the prose and frequently the words left their meaning some way behind, and often it was lost altogether. Perhaps it’s just not possible to explain the counterintuitive ideas as he tries using mere words and no equations at all. And so few diagrams too. I just might try and read it again.

⭐This is a very good book for people, like myself, who are curious bystanders to the science of quantum mechanics and it’s inherent weirdness. Philip Ball, as the title suggests, attempts to demystify the subject and, I believe, largely succeeds. In particular, he explodes common misperceptions like superposition is about possibilities (in fact, probabilities) rather than actual replication as people tend to think. Of course, if you are a ‘many worlds’ advocate (called MWI by Ball) you may disagree, but Ball does his best to show that MWI creates more problems than it solves. Ball challenged my own point of view on this subject, to the extent that it gave me a deeper understanding. That’s the best recommendation I can give.

⭐I keep trying to tell my friends that the first person who can explain how a microwave actually works, will get the Nobel Peace Prize. Well Philip Ball, the author takes a while to get out of the starting blocks and into his stride (or maybe he’s being courteous to his readers – I’m not sure). But he demonstrates clearly why Quantum Theory is not an explanation of how reality works, but a series of mathematical constructs that let us predict outcomes. And that really is what the book is about. You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist, but being a philosopher helps. I’m still working my way through it. I’m enjoying it. If such things interest you then I thoroughly recommend it.

⭐I love this book. It’s a stunning, judicious investigation of quantum theory and many of its key interpretations. As an interested non-scientist, I’ve read several books on the subject, and this was refreshing on many levels. I found several of my beliefs about QT promptly opened up and dismantled, as PB propounds ways of understanding quantum phenomena that eschew the common tropes of thinking about QT. I liked the way PB explored the implications of various interpretations of QT for big philosophical questions about reality, knowledge and our interactions with the world. PB writes so clearly, and thoughtfully about the mind-bending quantum world and yet points, convincingly IMO, to how there needn’t be any contradiction to what we’re familiar with in the ‘classical’ world, so long as we are willing to accept the particular kind of conditional knowledge suggested by the outcomes of experiments into quantum objects. This is the book about quantum theory / mechanics I would recommend as a must-read.

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