Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work.

A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging object: no matter how wide the swing of a pendulum, the time it takes to complete each arc remains exactly the same.' Unfortunately this doesn't apply however wide the swing - making science accessible is no excuse for inaccuracy.

The big problem was that as a reader I found the structure to be baffling, jumping around between historical context and complex modern physics concepts which are mentioned without then being explained in any way. I can only imagine someone without a science background coming away from it baffled. Physics professors often need help to avoid writing text that is hard to comprehend, but unfortunately Céline Broeckaert isn't a science writer and doesn't seem to realise this. This means there was no one to point out that a sentence like  ‘The relationship arises because the laws of physics are symmetrical (invariant) under Galilean transformations’ needs more unpacking than it gets in the book.

Another issue is that obvious questions a general reader might asked get overlooked. For instance we are told (for some reason) that a goldfish looking at the water in its bowl at the molecular level ‘would see ‘everything looks the same. Why? The positions of the water molecule are so random that they look identical no matter the angle from which you look.’ Except water molecules have a distinctive shape that does not look the same whatever angle you look at them from. I know what the authors were getting at - but this is terrible way to say it. 

This isn’t helped by the heavy-handed ‘quirkiness’ that sometimes makes it feel like the writing is aimed at children. Take, for instance, ‘One fine day Sir William Rowan Hamilton fell in love. But not just in love, oh no. He fell in love as only an astronomer could: to the moon and back.’ Yet within a page, the book is introducing eigenfrequencies. This is without really saying what they are or how they are used - not surprisingly since no concepts of quantum physics have been introduced at this point in the narrative.

The title is perhaps more literal than the authors intended - certainly no one will understand quantum physics after reading this book. I'm assuming the title is based on the great Richard Feynman's words in QED 'You think I’m going to explain [quantum physics] to you so you can understand it? No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won’t be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to persuade you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. This is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.' Yet Feynman (who only gets a passing mention) made his science communication extremely accessible. This claims to be 'an accessible book on quantum physics.' It is not.

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