Skip to main content

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions - Alain Aspect ***

What an opportunity missed. This little book (very little) provided a wonderful opportunity for one of the great physicists of the last 50 years to bring to life his work on quantum entanglement - a topic in which he excels - but instead all we get is a very high level description of the history of the subject.

The book is clearly modelled on Carlo Rovelli's massive-selling Seven Brief Lessons (down to the cover design) - but here we get significantly less than even that provided. Alain Aspect identifies two quantum revolutions (although Einstein, of course features, the book isn't about Einstein, only seeming to appear in the title for visibility). The first was the introduction of quantum physics itself - the second starts in the 1960s with Bell's Theorem, opening up the possibility of first testing the weird reality of quantum entanglement, then into the applications of entanglement in quantum computing and quantum encryption.

Aspect's work was fundamental to showing that quantum theory really did do away with local reality - that entangled quantum particles were genuinely able to effectively communicate (even though we can't control what they communicate) instantaneously at any distance. It would have been fascinating and delightful to get some personal experience, some context for his work - but there's nothing. 

There's no mention, for example, of the young Alain Aspect, volunteering as an aid worker in Cameroon in 1971, giving him a chance to immerse himself in the then-largely neglected controversies that had arisen in quantum physics in the 1930s and to discover John Bell's intriguing but then obscure paper showing that the abilities of entanglement could be tested. Similarly, when we get to Aspect's groundbreaking experiment, although David Kaiser in his Foreword mentions the how remarkable it was that Aspect's experiment was able to change its setup ten million times faster than the blink of an eye, there is no mention of how Aspect achieved this (remarkable in itself). Sadder still, we get no personal account of the trials and tribulations involved to give a feel for what making the experiment work entailed.

Compare this with a lecture I heard Anton Zeilinger (co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with Aspect) give on his work on entanglement. This gave us the necessary background, but also took the audience (in narrative) into the sewers of Vienna to discover some of the obstacles they had overcome. An equivalent from Aspect would have been absolutely fascinating - but instead we only got a brief, detached summary of entanglement and its implications. 

For entanglement groupies like me, anything about the subject is worth having, and I'm glad to be able to read (translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan) some words from the great man: I'd certainly not discourage anyone with an interest from buying a copy. We are promised by the back cover that 'a Nobel Laureate offers a brief lesson on physics' biggest mystery' - brief it certainly is. But, might I modestly suggest, a book like The God Effect will give far more depth on entanglement without ever getting over-technical - and such titles give far more insight into the scientists involved than can be gleaned from such a dry summary. 

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more