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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. 

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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