Unlike the general theory of relativity or cosmology, quantum physics is an aspect of physics that has had a huge impact on everyday lives, particularly through the deployment of electronics, but also, for example, where superconductivity has led to practical applications. But when Paul Davies is talking about version 2.0, he is specifically describing quantum information, where quantum particles and systems are used in information technology. This obviously includes quantum computers, but Davies also brings in, for example, the potential for quantum AI technology. Quantum computers have been discussed for decades - algorithms had already been written for them as early as the 1990s - but it's only now that they are starting to become usable devices, not at the personal level but in servers. In his usual approachable style, Davies gives us four chapters bringing us up to speed on quantum basics, but then brings in quantum computing. After this we don't get solid quantum informat...

When a book is a classic of the field it can be easy to forget to review it. Richard Feynman's 1985  QED is one of the best-thumbed books on my shelves, and still in print - so it seemed sensible to cover it. Because Feynman has a number of books with his name on the cover from his remarkable anecdotes in Surely You are Joking Mister Feynman? to the anything-but-popular-science Red Book ( The Feynman Lectures on Physics ), it can be a surprise to realise that he never wrote a book per se. What we get in print is either transcripts of lectures, shorter pieces collected or interviews. In the case of QED it was a lecture series given at UCLA to cover quantum electrodynamics - as the subtitle tells us, the strange theory of light and matter (and particularly light and electrons where much of the interaction takes place). Feynman tells us that the book 'purports to be a record of the lectures', but has been significantly edited by Ralph Leighton. Along the way, the reader gai...

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 o...

This is a fascinating and unique book about the parallel development of, and occasional interactions between, modern physics and contemporary classical music. It’s also a far easier and more enjoyable read than its narrowly academic-sounding title might suggest. If it had been called ‘Music and Quantum Physics’ then I suspect far more people would be motivated to check it out – and, for the most part, I think they’d get exactly what they were looking for. I deliberately moved the word ‘music’ to the front of my version of the title, because that’s what the book is primarily about – with physics being a background thread, rather than vice versa. Equally, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin is essentially a professional musician with a sideline in the history and philosophy of science – a far less common combination than the other way around. He also seems to have been something of a musical prodigy, mentioning physics-inspired compositions that he wrote as far back as 2013, when he was just 14 years o...

Anyone who writes popular science books that are so thick they could act as doorstops should pay more attention to what Frank Close achieves. In a slim, small volume he manages to pack in a huge amount of information without compromising at all on quality. His latest such book is Charge - dealing with various types of charge from electrical to colour (in the quark sense). This starts off brilliantly with a point about electrical charge that had never occurred to me. Close tells us that with every breath you inhale sufficient electrons to absorb a charge of around 15,000 coulombs 'enough to spark 1000 bolts of lightning'. And if breathing steadily, the equivalent current would be about 3,000 amps. Thankfully, though, the balancing positive charge from the nucleus means you don't fry. (This is slightly misleading as the comparison with lightning only works if you consider charge - the current in a lightning bolt is typically about 10 times higher as it lasts a much briefer t...

On a first glance of the cover you might think that Jim Baggott and John Heilbron were brilliant Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein impersonators. In fact Baggott is an excellent popular science writer and Heilbron was an esteemed historian of science, both specialising in quantum physics. There's another way the cover is misleading - you might think this was an in-depth exploration of Bohr and Einstein's relationship. The topics they argued about certainly come into it, but instead this is detailed look at how quantum theory developed. I've read a lot of books on quantum physics, but I've never come across one that goes into such painstaking detail of every step along the way, introducing the work of a good number of physicists who rarely make it into the public eye. These range from John von Neumann - well known but usually sidelined as a quantum physicist - to the likes of Oskar Klein and Hans Kramers. Similarly, Baggott and Heilbron go into many (many) steps along the w...

Douglas Adams in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy points out that the guide starts off frenetically, commenting on how mind-bogglingly big space is, but 'after a while it settles down a bit and it starts telling you things you actually want to know…' Quantum Supremacy is written in this style. To begin with, the reader is battered with all the amazing things quantum computers will (or at least might be able to) do, but eventually things calm down and we get onto some useful content. What you won't find here is any detail on the nature of quantum computers, how they work or on the very significant challenges faced in achieving anything that is to become mainstream. This is all treated at even higher level than a serious newspaper article would. What Michio Kaku is interested in is the potential applications, and the book takes us through a significant number of these. You will read how quantum computers have the potential to transform our understanding of biology ...

At first glance this book has all the hallmarks of an attempt to tie quantum woo into ancient philosophical and religious beliefs, where some vague resemblance between an ancient observation about, say, 'the oneness of everything' and some aspect of quantum physics is given as evidence of the great wisdom of the ancients. In practice, if you make vague enough statements they can be said to prefigure anything - and have no connection to modern science. Thankfully, though, that's not what much of Heinrich Päs's book is about. What Päs sets out to show is that the reason that quantum physics can seem strange, if not downright weird, is that we are looking at things from the wrong direction. Quantum physics is hugely successful at practical stuff - predicting what will happen to enable successful design of, for example, electronics, but doesn't have a big picture: there is no satisfactory explanation of what's going on 'under the hood'. Päs suggests this is ...

There are very few individuals who have made such wide contributions to mathematical and scientific topics as did John von Neumann. In this splendid scientific biography, Ananyo Bhattacharya introduces to many for the first time both von Neumann's work and life. It's easy to get the balance between the life and the science wrong with this kind of biography - Bhattacharya keeps it just right, filling in all the biographical details we need, without falling into the trap of giving us endless boring detail of the von Neumann family's background. Similarly, with a couple of small exceptions I'll mention later, the description of his work is at a level that remains approachable with a bit of effort from the reader, yet we are given enough information to see just how important and novel von Neumann's contribution was. The significantly more famous Richard Feynman is probably the only twentieth century scientist I can think of with the breadth of interests and originality ...

In recent days there has been a surge in interest in quantum computing - computers that use quantum particles as the equivalent of bits. Out of the blue, I've received several invitations to talk to people about quantum computing as a result of my my book, imaginatively named Quantum Computing , which provides an introduction to the field. I suspect this upsurge is because of the recent announcement that the BBC dramatically headlined Quantum breakthrough could revolutionise computing .  This is a topic that has suffered from considerable hype in the past - so is this breakthrough (which there certainly has been) transformative or an incremental step towards what is still a fairly distant proposition? The reason quantum computers are of huge interest is that for certain applications they can, in principle, carry out calculations that would take conventional computers the lifetime of the universe to churn through. The reason that they can do this is that instead of using bits that c...