The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder (PDF)

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In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected–a phenomenon which he derisively described as “spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation “entanglement.” Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist John Bell demonstrated just how strange this entanglement really was. Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing the scientists’ own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. The result is a richly illuminating exploration of one of the most exciting concepts of quantum physics.

User’s Reviews

Opiniones editoriales Review “Captivating. . . . A movingly human and surprisingly accessible picture of the unveiling of the quantum universe. . . . Admirably lucid.” —Chicago Tribune“A sparkling, original book. . . . Gilder brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities handled with a verve reminiscent of Jeremy Berstein’s scientific portraits in The New Yorker. . . . What had been for generations a story of theoretical malcontents now intrigues spooks and start-ups. All this radiates from Louisa Gilder’s story. Quantum physics lives.” —The New York Times Book Review“Highly entertaining. . . . Hard to put down. . . . Grippingly readable. . . . Gilder is a fine storyteller who brings to life one of the great scientific adventures of our time.” —American Scientist“[A] fascinating yarn. . . . For anyone who wants to understand the human angle of modern physics and separate quirks from quarks, this is your book.” —The Providence Journal (A Best Book of 2008)“A witty, charming, and accurate account of the history of that bugaboo of physics–quantum entanglement . . . There are many books out there on the history or foundations of quantum mechanics. Some are more technical, others more historical, but none take the unique approach that Gilder has–to focus on the quantum weirdness of entanglement itself as her book’s unifying them and to present it in an inviting and accessible way . . . Delightful.” —Science“Astonishing. . . . The courage and even audacity of a nonscientist to investigate the evolution of ideas about the most esoteric aspects of quantum physics are truly remarkable. . . . Gilder is a phenomenal writer.” —Charleston Post & Courier“A welcome addition to the genre. . . . [Gilder’s] book really shines . . . [She] proves that the neglected last fifty years of quantum mechanics is . . . full of brilliant, quirky personalities and mind-bending discoveries. . . . She is a very compelling writer, and she clearly understands what makes science exciting and science history interesting.” —ScientificBlogging.com“The clearest and most intriguing history of the manner in which the scientific method continues to advance knowledge. An amazing story.” —Sacramento News & Review“A delightfully unconventional history. . . . Especially enjoyable are the portraits of the less famous physicists . . . Gilder has done her homework.” —Nature“[Gilder] displays an ability to capture a personality in a few words.” —The Washington Post“An admirable, unexpected book, historically sound and seamlessly constructed, that transports those of us who do not understand quantum mechanics into the lives and thoughts of those who did.” —George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines“Louisa Gilder disentangles the story of entanglement with such narrative panache, such poetic verve and such metaphorical precision that for a moment I almost thought I understood quantum mechanics.” —Matt Ridley, author of Genome About the Author Louisa Gilder was born in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2000. This is her first book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The Socks 1978 and 1981 In 1978, when John Bell first met Reinhold Bertlmann, at the weekly tea party at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, near Geneva, he could not know that the thin young Austrian, smiling at him through a short black beard, was wearing mismatched socks. And Bertlmann did not notice the characteristically logical extension of Bell’s vegetarianism—plastic shoes. Deep under the ground beneath these two pairs of maverick feet, ever-increasing magnetic fields were accelerating protons (pieces of the tiny center of the atom) around and around a doughnut-shaped track a quarter of a kilometer in diameter. Studying these particles was part of the daily work of CERN, as the organization was called (a tangled history left the acronym no longer correlated with the name). In the early 1950s, at the age of twenty-five, Bell had acted as consultant to the team that designed this subterranean accelerator, christened in scientific pseudo-Greek “the Proton Synchrotron.” In 1960, the Irish physicist returned to Switzerland to live, with his Scottish wife, Mary, also a physicist and a designer of accelorators. CERN’s charmless, colorless campus of box-shaped buildings with protons flying through their foundations became Bell’s intellectual home for the rest of his life, in the green pastureland between Geneva and the mountains. At such a huge and impersonal place, Bell believed, newcomers should be welcomed. He had never seen Bertlmann before, and so he walked up to him and said, his brogue still clear despite almost two decades in Geneva: “I’m John Bell.” This was a familiar name to Bertlmann—familiar, in fact, to almost anyone who studied the high-speed crashes and collisions taking place under Bell’s and Bertlmann’s feet (in other words, the disciplines known as particle physics and quantum field theory). Bell had spent the last quarter of a century conducting piercing investigations into these flying, decaying, and shattering particles. Like Sherlock Holmes, he focused on details others ignored and was wont to make startlingly clear and unexpected assessments. “He did not like to take commonly held views for granted but tended to ask, ‘How do you know?,’ ” said his professor, Sir Rudolf Peierls, a great physicist of the previous generation. “John always stood out through his ability to penetrate to the bottom of any argument,” an early co-?worker remembered, “and to find the flaws in it by very simple reasoning.” His papers—numbering over one hundred by 1978—were an inventory of such questions answered, and flaws or treasures discovered as a result.Bertlmann already knew this, and that Bell was a theorist with an almost quaint sense of responsibility who shied away from grand speculations and rooted himself in what was directly related to experiments at CERN. Yet it was this same responsibility that would not let him ignore what he called a “rottenness” or a “dirtiness” in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the theory with which they all worked. Probing the weak points of these foundations—the places in the plumbing where the theory was, as he put it, “unprofessional”—occupied Bell’s free time. Had those in the lab known of this hobby, almost none of them would have approved. But on a sabbatical in California in 1964, six thousand miles from his responsibilities at CERN, Bell had made a fascinating discovery down there in the plumbing of the theory. Revealed in that extraordinary paper of 1964, Bell’s theorem showed that the world of quantum mechanics—the base upon which the world we see is built—is composed of entities which are either, in the jargon of physics, not locally causal, not fully separable, or even not real unless observed. If the entities of the quantum world are not locally causal, then an action like measuring a particle can have instantaneous “spooky” effects across the universe. As for separability: “Without such an assumption of the mutually independent existence (the ‘being-?thus’) of spatially distant things…,” Einstein insisted, “physical thought in the sense familiar to us would not be possible. Nor does one see how physical laws could be formulated and tested without such a clean separation.” The most extreme version of nonseparability is the idea that the quantum entities are not independently real: that atoms do not become solid until they are observed, like the proverbial tree that makes no sound when it falls unless a listener is around. Einstein found the implications ludicrous: “Do you really believe the moon is not there if nobody looks?” Up to that point, the idea of science rested on separability, as Einstein had said. It could be summarized as humankind’s long intellectual journey away from magic (not locally causal) and from anthropocentricism (not independently real). Perversely, and to the consternation of Bell himself, his theorem brought physics to the point where it seemingly had to choose between these absurdities. Whatever the ramifications, it would become obvious by the beginning of this century that Bell’s paper had caused a sea change in physics. But in 1978 the paper, published fourteen years before in an obscure journal, was still mostly unknown. Bertlmann looked with interest at his new acquaintance, who was smiling affably with eyes almost shut behind big metal-rimmed glasses. Bell had red hair that came down over his ears—not flaming red, but what was known in his native country as “ginger”—and a short beard. His shirt was brighter than his hair, and he wore no tie. In his painstaking Viennese-inflected English, Bertlmann introduced himself: “I’m Reinhold Bertlmann, a new fellow from Austria.” Bell’s smile broadened. “Oh? And what are you working on?” It turned out that they were both engaged with the same calculations dealing with quarks, the tiniest bits of matter. They found they had come up with the same results, Bell by one method on his desktop calculator, Bertlmann by the computer program he had written. So began a happy and fruitful collaboration. And one day, Bell happened to notice Bertlmann’s socks. Three years later, in an austere room high up in one of the majestic stone buildings of the University of Vienna, Bertlmann was curled over the screen of one of the physics department’s computers, deep in the world of quarks, thinking not in words but in equations. His computer—at fifteen feet by six feet by six feet one of the department’s smaller ones—almost filled the room. Despite the early spring chill, the air-conditioning ran, fighting the heat produced by the sweatings and whirrings of the behemoth. Occasionally Bertlmann fed it a new punch card perforated with a line of code. He had been at his work for hours as the sunlight moved silently around the room. He didn’t look up at the sound of someone’s practiced fingers poking the buttons that unlocked the door, nor when it swung open. Gerhard Ecker, from across the hall, was coming straight at him, a sheaf of papers in hand. He was the university’s man in charge of receiving preprints—papers that have yet to be published, which authors send to scientists whose work is related to their own. Ecker was laughing. “Bertlmann!” he shouted, even though he was not four feet away. Bertlmann looked up, bemused, as Ecker thrust a preprint into his hands: “You’re famous now!” The title, as Bertlmann surveyed it, read: Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality J. S. Bell CERN, Geneve, Suisse The article was slated for publication in a French physics periodical, Journal de Physique, later in 1981. Its title was almost as incomprehensible to Bertlmann as it would be for a casual reader. “But what’s this about? What possibly—” Ecker said, “Read it, read it.” He read. The philosopher in the street, who has not suffered a course in quantum mechanics, is quite unimpressed by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations. He can point to many examples of similar correlations in everyday life. The case of Bertlmann’s socks is often cited. My socks? What is he talking about? And EPR correlations? It’s a big joke, John Bell is playing a big published joke on me. “EPR”—short for the paper’s authors, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen—was, like Bell’s 1964 theorem, which it inspired thirty years later, something of an embarrassment for physics. To the question posed by their title, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” Einstein and his lesser-known cohorts answered no. They brought to the attention of physicists the existence of a mystery in the quantum theory. Two particles that had once interacted could, no matter how far apart, remain “entangled”—the word Schrödinger coined in that same year—1935—to describe this mystery. A rigorous application of the laws of quantum mechanics seemed to force the conclusion that measuring one particle affected the state of the second one: acting on it at a great distance by those “spooky” means. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen therefore felt that quantum mechanics would be superseded by some future theory that would make sense of the case of the correlated particles. Physicists around the world had barely looked up from their calculations. Years went by, and it became more and more obvious that despite some odd details, ignored like the eccentricities of a general who is winning a war, quantum mechanics was the most accurate theory in the history of science. But John Bell was a man who noticed details, and he noticed that the EPR paper had not been satisfactorily dealt with. Bertlmann felt like laughing in confusion. He looked at Ecker, who was grinning: “Read on, read on.” Dr. Bertlmann likes to wear two socks of different colors. Which color he will have on a given foot on a given day is quite unpredictable. But when you see (Fig. 1) that the first sock is pink…What is Fig. 1? My socks? Bertlmann ruffled through the pages and found, appended at the end, a little line sketch of the kind John Bell was fond of doing: But when you see that the first sock is pink you can be already sure that the second sock will not be pink. Observation of the first, and experience of Bertlmann, give immediate information about the second. There is no accounting for tastes, but apart from that there is no mystery here. And is not the EPR business just the same? Bertlmann imagined John’s voice saying this, conjured up his amused face. For three years we worked together every day and he never said a thing.Ecker was laughing. “What do you think?” Bertlmann had already dashed past him, out the door, down the hall to the phone, and with trembling fingers was calling CERN. Bell was in his office when the phone rang, and Bertlmann came on the line, completely incoherent. “What have you done? What have you done?” Bell’s clear laugh alone, so familiar and matter-?of-?fact, was enough to bring the world into focus again. Then Bell said, enjoying the whole thing: “Now you are famous, Reinhold.” “But what is this paper about? Is this a big joke?” “Read the paper, Reinhold, and tell me what you think.” A tigress paces before a mirror. Her image, down to the last stripe, mimics her every motion, every sliding muscle, the smallest twitch of her tail. How are she and her reflection correlated? The light shining down on her narrow slinky shoulders bounces off them in all directions. Some of this light ends up in the eye of the beholder: either straight from her fur, or by a longer route, from tiger to mirror to eye. The beholder sees two tigers moving in perfectly opposite synchrony.Look closer. Look past the smoothness of that coat to see its hairs; past its hairs to see the elaborate architectural arrangements of molecules that compose them, and then the atoms of which the molecules are made. Roughly a billionth of a meter wide, each atom is (to speak very loosely) its own solar system, with a dense center circled by distant electrons. At these levels—molecular, atomic, electronic—we are in the native land of quantum mechanics. The tigress, though large and vividly colored, must be near the mirror for a watcher to see two correlated cats. If she is in the jungle, a few yards’ separation would leave the mirror showing only undergrowth and swinging vines. Even out in the open, though, at a certain distance the curvature of the earth would rise up to obscure mirror from tigress and decouple their synchrony. But the entangled particles Bell was talking about in his paper can act in unison with the whole universe in between. Quantum entanglement, as Bell would go on to explain in his paper, is not really like Bertlmann’s socks. No one puzzles over how he always manages to pick different-colored socks, or how he pulls the socks onto his feet. But in quantum mechanics there is no idiosyncratic brain “choosing” to coordinate distant particles, and it is hard not to compare how they do it to magic. In the “real world,” correlations are the result of local influences, unbroken chains of contact. One sheep butts another—there’s a local influence. A lamb comes running to his mother’s bleat after waves of air molecules hit each other in an entirely local domino effect, starting from her vocal cords and ending when they beat the tiny drum in the baby’s ear in a pattern his brain recognizes as Mom. Sheep scatter at the arrival of a coyote: the moving air has carried bits of coyote musk and dandruff into their nostrils, or the electromagnetic waves of light from the moon have bounced off the coyote’s pelt and into the retinas of their eyes. Either way, it’s all local, including the nerves firing in each sheep’s brain to say danger, and carrying the message to her muscles. Grown up, sold, and separated on different farms, twin lambs both still chew their cud after eating, and produce lambs that look eerily similar. These correlations are still local. No matter how far the lambs ultimately separate, their genetic material was laid down when they were a single egg inside their mother’s womb. Bell liked to talk about twins. He would show a photograph of the pair of Ohio identical twins (both named “Jim”) separated at birth and then reunited at age forty, just as Bell was writing “Bertlmann’s Socks.” Their similarities were so striking that an institute for the study of twins was founded, appropriately enough at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Both Jims were nail-biters who smoked the same brand of cigarettes and drove the same model and color of car. Their dogs were named “Toy,” their ex-wives “Linda,” and current wives “Betty.” They were married on the same day. One Jim named his son James Alan, his twin named his son James Allen. They both liked carpentry—one made miniature picnic tables and the other miniature rocking chairs. Leer más

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

⭐In her ‘Note to the Reader,’ author Louisa Gilder explains, “This is a book of conversations, a book about how the give-and-take between physicists repeated change the direction in which quantum physics developed… All the conversations in this book occurred in some form, on the date specified in the text, and I have fully documented the substance of each one… Most are composed of direct quotes (or close paraphrases) from the trove of letters, papers, and memoirs that these physicists left behind. When occasional connective tissue (e.g., ‘Nice to see you,’ or ‘I agree’) was necessary, I tried to keep it both innocuous and also sensitive to the character, beliefs, and history of the people involved. (Pg. xiv)She observes in the Introduction, “The mysteries embedded in quantum mechanics provoked four major reactions from its founder: orthodoxy, heresy, agnosticism, and simple misunderstanding. Three of the theory’s founders ([Niels] Bohr, [Werner] Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli) gave it its orthodox exegesis, which came to be known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Three more founders (including Einstein) were heretics, believing that something was rotten in the quantum theory they had played such a role in developing, Finally, pragmatic people said, The time is not yet ripe for understanding these things, and confused people dismissed the mysteries with simplistic explanations.” (Pg. 4)She records, “in 1909, only nine years after quantum theory’s tentative debut, Albert Einstein began to worry that it implied a world composed of non-separable pieces that were ‘not… mutually independent.’… they seemed to exert ‘a mutual influence… of a quite mysterious nature’ on each other, or even seemed to affect each other in what he ridiculed as ‘spooky action-at-a-distance,’ or ‘a sort of telepathic coupling.’ To him it was clear that this meant a fatal flaw in the theory.” (Pg. 6)She notes, “Bell’s theorem showed that the world of quantum mechanics… is composed of entities that are either… not locally causal, not fully separable, and even not real unless observed. If the entities of the quantum world are not locally causal, then an action measuring a particle can have instantaneous ‘spooky’ effects across the universe… The most extreme version of nonseparability is the idea that the quantum entities do no become solid until they are observed, like the proverbial tree that makes no sound when it falls unless a listener is around. Einstein found the implications ludicrous: ‘Do you really believe the moon is not there is nobody looks?’” (Pg. 9-10)She recounts, “Einstein and Bohr would draw different morals from this difficultly of forming a picture of atomic behavior. Bohr would soon say it couldn’t be done. The behavior of atoms, and their insides, were irreducibly unvisualizable. Einstein would say there was something wrong with a physics that would come to this conclusion.” (Pg. 45)She reports a conversation: “‘I admit that I am strongly attracted,’ said Heisenberg slowly, ‘by the simplicity, and beauty, of the mathematical schemes with which nature suddenly spreads out before us—the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships, for which none of us was in the least prepared. I know you have felt this, too.’ Einstein sat smoking and nodding. Then he said, ‘Still, I should never claim that I really understood what is meant by the simplicity of natural laws.’” (Pg. 88)She says, “One day, after Einstein had asked for the umpteenth time if Bohr really believed God played dice to determine the future, a smile dawned on Bohr’s face. ‘Einstein,’ he said, ‘stop telling God how to run the world.’” (Pg. 113)She says of the famous EPR paper, “the paper famously (and significantly) defined an ‘element of reality’: ‘If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity… While we have shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we have left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.” (Pg. 160)She records, “‘One can even construct quite burlesque cases,’ wrote Schrödinger. He described ‘a cat shut up in a steel chamber with a diabolical apparatus…’ This apparatus involves a vial of poison which will be smashed by a hammer… [after] the decay of a single radioactive atom. If the atom decays, the cat breathes the poison; if not, the cat remains safe… There is so little radioactive substance ‘that in the course of ah hour PERHAPS one atom of it disintegrates, but also with equal probability not even one… If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, then one will say to himself that the cat is still living, if in that time no atom has disintegrated. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The [wave-]function of the entire system would express this situation by having the living and the dead cat mixed or smeared out.’ With this…. A cat in a superposition of simultaneous death and live—Schrödinger demonstrated the desperate state of a theory that required measurement to make it work.” (Pg. 173)She summarizes, “Every step—from the entanglement abstractly inherent in Schrödinger’s wave equation to EPR, when Einstein imagined just what this implied, to Bell’s closer scrutiny, finding it a testable conflict, to … bringing that conflict into the lab—was a step closer to incarnation. But this story had to far rested in the hands of the theorists. Nineteen sixty-nine was the year in which the experimentalists took command of the age of entanglement.” (Pg. 260)She imagines a conversation: “‘Does the chair exist when you’re not there to look at it?’… This is what I found infuriating… It’s the whole Bishop Berkeley question of ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?’ Quantum mechanics answers the bishop, ‘No.’ If you close the box, is the chair still there? How about a shoe? You’d be pretty surprised if your shoes changed color in the box coming home from the shoe store. How about ions?… So if you put an ion in your box, is it in the box when you close the lid? What if you have two photons in an entangled state … and you put one in the box you’re holding and one in the box I’m holding? Are they there?… Is IT in the box when you close the lid?” (Pg. 279)She concludes, “What is more likely is that that new way of seeing things will involve an imaginative leap that will astonish us. In any case, it seems that the quantum mechanical description will be superceded. In this it is like all theories made by man. But to an unusual extent its ultimate fate is apparent in its internal structure. It carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction.” (Pg. 330)Gilder’s reconstruction of these “conversations” makes for smoother reading (and she is an excellent writer); but some readers may find this makes the book more like a “novelization” than a genuine historical work.

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⭐Item arrived on time and as described. A unique non-mathematical presentation of complex conundrums inherent in quantum mechanics using the words and dialog of the pioneers who developed it. Entertaining!

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⭐Louisa Gilder’s book “The Age of Entanglement” is a rather unique and thoroughly engrossing book which tells the story of quantum mechanics and especially the bizarre quantum phenomenon called entanglement through a unique device- recreations of conversations between famous physicists. Although Gilder does take considerable liberty in fictionalizing the conversations, they are based on real events and for the most part the device works. Gilder is especially skilled at describing the fascinating experiments done by recent physicists which validated entanglement. This part is usually not found in other treatments of the history of physics. Having said that, the book is more a work of popular history than popular science, and I thought that Gilder should have taken more pains to clearly describe the science behind the spooky phenomena.Gilder’s research seems quite exhaustive and well-referenced, which was why the following observation jumped out of the pages and bothered me even more.On pg. 189, Gilder describes a paragraph from a very controversial and largely discredited book by Jerrold and Leona Schecter. The book which created a furor extensively quotes a Soviet KGB agent named Pavel Sudoplatov who claimed that, among others, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer were working for the Soviet Union and that Oppenheimer knew that Klaus Fuchs was a Soviet spy (who knew!). No evidence for these fantastic allegations has ever turned up. In spite of this, Gilder refers to the book and essentially quotes a Soviet handler named Merkulov who says that a KGB agent in California named Grigory Kheifets thought that Oppenheimer was willing to transmit secret information to the Soviets. Gilder says nothing more after this and moves on to a different topic.Now take a look at the footnotes on pg. 190-191 of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s authoritative biography of Oppenheimer (“American Prometheus”). B & S also quote exactly the same paragraph, but then emphatically add how there is not a shred of evidence to support what was said and how the whole thing was probably fabricated by Merkulov to save Kheifets’s life (since Kheifets had otherwise turned up empty-handed on potential recruits).If you want to obtain even more authoritative information on this topic, I would recommend the recent book “Spies” by Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev. The book has a detailed chapter which discusses the Merkulov and Kheifets letter procured by the Schecters and cited by Gilder. The chapter clearly says that absolutely no corroboration of the contents of this letter has been found in Kheifets’s own testimony after he returned to the Soviet Union or in the Venona transcripts. You would think that material of such importance would at the very least be corroborated by Kheifets himself. A source as valuable as Oppenheimer would also most certainly be mentioned in other communications. But no such evidence exists. The authors also point out other multiple glaring inconsistencies and fabrications in the documents cited in the Schecter volume. The book quite clearly says that as of 2008, there is absolutely no ambiguity or the slightest hint that Oppenheimer was willing to transmit secrets to the Soviets; the authors emphatically end the chapter saying that the case is closed.What is troubling is that Gilder quotes the paragraph and simply ends it there, leaving the question of Oppenheimer’s loyalty dangling and tantalizingly open-ended. She does not quote the clear conclusion drawn by B & S, Haynes, Klehr, Vassiliev and others that there is no evidence to support this insinuation. She also must surely be aware of several other general works on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, none of which give any credence to such allegations.You would expect more from an otherwise meticulous author like Gilder. I have no idea why she entertains the canard about Oppenheimer. But in an interview with her which I saw, she said that she was first fascinated by Oppenheimer (as most people were and still are) but was then repulsed by his treatment of his student David Bohm who dominates the second half of her book. Bohm was a great physicist and philosopher (his still-in-print textbook on quantum theory is unmatched for its logical and clear exposition), a dedicated left-wing thinker who was Oppenheimer’s student at Berkeley in the 1930s. After the War, he was suspected of being a communist and stripped of his faculty position at Princeton which was then very much an establishment institution. After this unfortunate incident, Bohm lived a peripatetic life in Brazil and Israel before settling down at Birkbeck College in England. Oppenheimer essentially distanced himself from Bohm after the war, had no trouble detailing Bohm’s left-wing associations to security agents and generally did not try to save Bohm from McCarthy’s onslaught.This is well-known; Robert Oppenheimer was a complex and flawed character. But did Gilder’s personal views of Oppenheimer in the context of Bohm taint her attitude toward him and cause her to casually toss out a tantalizing allegation which she must have known is not substantiated? I sure hope not. I think it would be great if Gilder would amend this material in a forthcoming edition of this otherwise fine book.

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⭐I liked the presentation of the material, which consists of invented (synthetic) conversations between many of the developers of the Quantum Theory. The presentation of the Physics was very well done – although some of the surrounding English used “for interest” was mildly irritating due to the need to keep stopping and looking up unnecessarily complicated English words in a dictionary. Certainly this is a very accessible treatment of very difficult concepts.The book started out well but seemed to drag a bit. Ultimately it did not deliver on its high star rating, leaving me a bit disappointed, especially as the critical entanglement part was less emphasized than the earlier material.

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⭐This book is simply marvellous, certainly to us professional physicists but I suspect to anyone with intellectual curiosity about one of the great, if not the greatest of all time, stories of scientific progress. What is especially wonderful is the way these legends of modern physics (Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Sommerfeld, Planck, Born, Kramers, Ehrenfest, Schroedinger, Dirac, De Broglie, Gamow, Rutherford and many more interacted socially. Einstein comes across as a particularly likeable guy. But they all ‘needed each other’. It seems light years away from the sterile, super-competitive university science ‘culture’ of today. May it revert back to collegiality as soon as possible, and may league tables of which university is top dog (who gives a monkeys), impact factors and other obscenities of this intellectually barren age be consigned to the dustbin of history forthwith.Thank you Professor Gilder!

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⭐a fascinating book of short essays on scientific moments in physics

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⭐An excellent informative book.

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⭐The theme of quantum entanglement is explored in terms of the concept, its implications, how its predictions conflict with those of classical physics, the practical consequences and technological opportunities. Development of all these aspects is pursued historically as a narrative in which visions, explanations, interpretations and contributors interact continually. Much of it is presented as a series of dialogues among the theorists engaged in the development and critique of quantum mechanics.So far, so appropriate; but the weakness in this account is that, although some conversations, exchanges of letters or publications of papers are a matter of record, others have been invented or synthesized from snippets and then further embellished with ambient details, thoughts, asides, facial expressions and so on (I lost count of the instances of raised eyebrows).Once the dialogues are interspersed with some longwinded reminiscences, glances into the future, family notes, menu details and so on, the embellished narrative becomes a distraction from what would otherwise be a reasoned discussion of some quite profound ideas.There is some good stuff buried here – amid the anecdotes and the fanciful allusions to ideas as resembling tigers, little lambs or head-butting rams – but I confess that, after a few chapters, I gave up on systematic digging for meaning and settled for reading snippets.

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