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The way I have thought about the world all my life is useless when trying to understand how the world works at a deeper level. I liked his explanation of that, as well as his explanations of the Copenhagen interpretation versus the many worlds theory. What happens to the ultra-fundamental human concept of countability when we deal with entangled states?
I thought you explained the physics well, and I liked your book for these explanations, but I found myself skipping over the animal-metaphors very early on. From 1999-2001, Chad was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Physics Department at Yale University, studying Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in the group of Mark Kasevich. The book starts with a basic introduction to what quantum physics is, and how it differs from classical physics.
Not only did it explain quantum with astute precision but also helped me develop a keen interest in quantum. Somehow I had the expectation that this would be dumbed down a lot, but the latter half of each chapter proved to be quite informative. I found this device far too distracting and cheesy for my tastes, and it adds very little to Orzel’s explanations. Orzel has a tendency to state a proposition, then use it later as a proof, which is bad science but probably good science-writing—actually demonstrating the proof would lose a lot of readers. So the dog has a great idea to split in 2 and go both ways round the tree, that way, the bunny can't escape.
Accessible to the point that I actually understood big chunks with varying degrees of uncertainty (that was a quantum joke, right there). Taking Emmy's anarchic behaviour as a starting point, Orzel explains the key theories of quantum physics.Especially the first chapters were very good, after 50% the book focussed more on the weird universe of quantum teleportation and the measurements done in quantum optics, in line with the professional interest of Chad Orzel. The conversations with the dog, although they actually are occasionally a bit cutesy, are funny and do add information that helps clarify the science presented.
Anybody who was forced by their physics teacher at school to comment on the way that iron filings orientate when brought into proximity with a magnet knows what the classical interpretation of a field is. I've been exposed to this subject a thousand times and I keep bashing my head against the physics wall hoping something will sink in yet I still understand very little. On quantum teleportation: “You could use it to make a quantum version of the Internet, if you had a couple of quantum computers that you needed to connect together.At a length of just a couple of hundred pages, the book doesn’t cover all quantum ideas, but it also doesn’t bury the reader under a mountain of scientific jargon and data. A dog won't find dropped food on the same block every day, and a photon won't interact with a molecule in the same part of the interferometer every time. One of the things I love to do is browse around in the library looking at whatever catches my attention.