Quantum Entanglement (Essential Knowledge)

Quantum Entanglement (Essential Knowledge) - Jed Brody ****

An entry in MIT Press's pocket-sized Essential Knowledge series, this is an attempt to take on one of the strangest and most mind-bending aspects of physics - quantum entanglement - in a new way.

There are several books describing the historical development and implications of quantum entanglement, but what Jed Brody does is take an experimentalist's view and helps the reader understand what is involved in a Bell inequality and how a test of quantum entanglement in this fashion really works.

There are other bits as well - a very rapid introduction and a rather tagged-on feeling bit about quantum theory and relativity, plus a too-brief-to-understand trip into the unlikely world of quantum Bayesianism. But the crucial part of the book, and the reason it gets four stars, is that experimental bit. Specifically what Brody does, something that I have never seen before in any other book on the subject, is give an explanation of a specific Bell inequality that proves why the outcome of a particular measurement runs counter to local realism - that's a real achievement. Usually, the best that can be done is to tell the reader such an experiment will prove the outcome without explaining why.

There is one big proviso. I think this is a great book if you have already picked up the background to quantum entanglement (try The God Effect for this, rather than Brody's 'further reading' recommendations), but it really wouldn't be so useful if you haven't absorbed the context, history and meaning - so if the bits of the review above referring to a Bell inequality, say, don't mean a lot to you, do some background reading first.

Even with that background, some of the later examples that Brody gives involve just too much twisted logic to easily get your brain around - but I still think that the relatively small part of the book that involves working through a basic Bell inequality is well worth laying your hands on it, and make this title unique.

Definitely one of the better additions to this quirky series.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog