Skip to main content

Quantum Sense and Nonsense - Jean Bricmont ****

You wait years for a book on the interpretation of quantum physics, then two come along within a couple of months of each other. However, while both Quantum Sense and Nonsense and Philip Ball's Beyond Weird are aimed at a popular science audience (or popular sience as the back cover unfortunately categorises Jean Bricmont's book), they take a very line different. Without resorting to textbook levels of complexity, Quantum Sense and Nonsense goes into the quantum physics in considerably more depth, though at the cost of losing some readability.

 Although Bricmont explains various quantum bits and pieces, such as the wave function, along the way, his focus throughout is on three key issues that need to be dealt with in getting an understanding of what the theory's really doing. These are the role of the observer, whether or not there is determinism (as opposed to true randomness) and whether or not locality holds - the alternative being what Einstein referred to as 'spooky action at a distance.'

 This is also effectively a book in three acts. The first gives us background to what the problem with interpretation of quantum physics is, goes through the Copenhagen interpretation, and introduces the oddity of the two slit experiment. This is reasonably readable. There's then a centre section that fills in a lot of detail, which is harder going. Finally, there's the most approachable part in the last two chapters where Bricmont gives us a 'revised history' of quantum physics and considers its cultural impact.

 What was particularly refreshing about this book is that it's the first I've ever read for a popular audience that properly explains the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. It has to do this, as Bricmont is a relative rarity amongst physicists in being fully aware of it and supportive of it. He makes a convincing case that the interpretation was largely ignored because of Bohm's political views (he was effectively forced to leave the US for having communist leanings), and makes more sense than it is usually considered to. 

 There were a couple of examples where Bricmont seemed to verge on cherry picking to strengthen the pro-Bohm argument. He is very critical of those who try to combine quantum physics with Eastern mystical philosophy, yet plays down the fact that Bohm also did this (which was probably as much why his interpretation was ignored as his politics). More significantly, the book paints a picture of the Copenhagen interpretation in an early form where the role of the observer and measurement is very much about experiments, rather than interaction of quantum objects with the environment. If you are familiar with this aspect of quantum interpretation it seemed significant that the word 'decoherence' only appears once, and that was in a footnote.

 Although it's not always the most reader-friendly text (not helped by the author repeatedly referring to himself in the plural), I would recommend this title if you want to get a distinctly different picture of quantum physics and an understanding of why, even after 80-90 years, physicists may be happy with the results of the calculations, but still can't agree on what it all really means.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...
Post a Comment
Read more