48 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The creative and insightful history of science's next big thing, November 30, 2008
This review is from: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (Hardcover)
Louisa Gilder's new book is about abstract science and the very real people who clash (and collaborate) over its truth and meaning. *The Age of Entanglement* is an old story with a new perspective, a dramatic new telling -- and a new ending. An ending that shows Einstein was right and launches quantum physics toward its next great chapter.
All the old characters are here -- Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger (who coined the word "entanglement"), Pauli, Born, Dirac, de Broglie, and of course Einstein, who thought "spooky action at a distance" was implausible yet found Bohr's entire quantum mechanical philosophy even less convincing. Unlike other tellings, however, Gilder vividly deploys their actual words from speeches, papers, letters, and memoirs to recreate the intense conversations and rancorous debates that toppled the Newtonian world. Our new understanding of entanglement, moreover, changes the very nature of the old quantum debates. Gilder's description of Schrödinger's epiphany that led to his wave equation is almost euphorically exciting and inspiring.
Despite the quantum revolution, big questions remained, questions that only Einstein, Schrödinger and few others had the courage to raise. And now enters the new cast -- Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, David Bohm, Richard Feynman, and the particle smashing Irishman John Bell, who from the early 1960s through his untimely death in 1990 showed entanglement was real. Bell is perhaps the most-important-little-known physicist, and Gilder brings the late CERN engineer-theorist to life just as his work has become the most-cited in all of physics and is breaking out across the scientific and technological frontiers.
From Vienna, Solvay, and Copenhagen to Rio, Princeton, Berkeley, Geneva, and back to Vienna, the reader is there for Bell's intuitive breakthrough that brought the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper out of laughable obscurity back to forefront of the debate (EPR argued that quantum mechanics was incomplete). And you are in the basement room where the experimentalists John Clauser and Dick Holt constructed the awkward tubular photon-counter that first proved the entanglement that years later multi-kilometer fiber-optic rings around Geneva would show with even greater precision.
Waves or particles, statistics or reality, mind or matter, information or physics, these are some of the biggest questions we know. This is the mystery of the entanglement that, although still not fully understood, is even now spawning new technologies like quantum cryptography and quantum computing and which, as you will find at the end of Gilder's great book, somehow connects the universe across the generations.
-Bret Swanson
---------------
Here is Gilder (on page 242) recounting a typically rich offering from the understated but always logical John Bell:
Bell looked at Jauch as if he wasn't quite certain the other hadn't been making a joke. "I have a question about complementarity," he said, in the voice of one who is changing the topic slightly. "Because it seems to me that Bohr used the word with the reverse of its usual meaning." He grinned, tipping he head to the side. "Consider, for example, the elephant. From the front she is head, trunk, and two legs. From the back she is bottom, tail, and two legs. From the sides she is otherwise, and from the top and bottom different again. These various views are complementary in the usual sense of the word. The supplement one another, they are consistent with one another, and they are all entailed by the unifying concept `elephant.'" Bell's hands gestured to suggest this. His eyebrows then lowered. "But Bohr, Bohr wouldn't -- it's my impression that to suppose Bohr used the word in this ordinary way would have been regarded by him as missing his point and trivializing his thought. He seems to insist rather that we must use in our analysis elements which contradict one another, which do not add up to, or derive from, a whole. By `complementary' he meant, it seems to me, the reverse: contradictariness."
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35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too Ambitious; Not Enough Detail, June 6, 2009
This review is from: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (Hardcover)
This book is a laudable effort at a popular account of one of the most remarkable and counterintuitive discoveries in modern science, the existence of entanglement. Gilder covers the development of quantum mechanics, the considerable disputes over its foundations and consequences, and the eventual discovery of non-locality and entanglement. A number of important figures, notably Bohr, Einstein, and Schrodinger figure prominently. Gilder focuses also on a number of lesser known figures, notably the theoretician David Bohm and several experimental physicists, and above all, the important theoretician JS Bell. Gilder develops her narrative with an unconventional and largely successful device. She reconstructs important events and particularly important conversations in an effort to present the history accurately and give it an accessible quality.
Gilder's story is essentially the difficulty of coming to terms of some of the counter-intuitive implications of quantum theory. She presents Einstein and some others, notably Louis DeBroglie and Schrodinger, as drawing attention to some of the challenges to conventional thinking inherent in quantum mechanics. In her reconstruction, efforts to draw attention to these problems were repulsed by the fuzzy orthodoxy of the doctrine of complementarity emanating from Bohr. Eventually, individuals like Bell would question this orthodoxy and produce theoretical treatments that expanded the truly strange implications of quantum mechanics and suggest possible experiments. In an irony that Gilder doesn't expand upon, Einstein's doubts eventually gave rise to research that confirmed the counter-intuitive properties that Einstein felt were likely to undermine quantum mechanics. Much of this is quite well done and this book is generally written well.
Gilder has, however, bitten off more than she can chew. A large fraction of the book is an abbreviated history of the emergence of quantum theory. While generally solid, this is not crucial for the main story. At the same time, her description of quantum phenomena and entanglement would have benefited from more extensive description. The same is true for her description of the experiments that demonstrated entanglement and its features. Gilder would have done better to provide more detail on the basic features of quantum mechanics and entanglement and then proceed to the history of entanglement. She is also somewhat superficial on some important issues, such as the role of Von Neumann's non hidden variables argument.
Gilder also presents the story as one of generational conflict and change, and to a considerable extent, this is correct. But what would have happened if WWII hadn't occurred and interrupted the normal activities of many physicists? It seems likely that physicists would have had to confront the problems at the root of quantum mechanics much earlier.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book on a very important topic, January 7, 2009
This review is from: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (Hardcover)
Kudos to Louisa Gilder for tackling an important topic in such a creative and wonderful manner. The author has done what very few seem capable of doing - making quantum physics understandable and enjoyable for the non-scientist and layperson. There are quite a few books that attempt to tackle the subject of entanglement, but Gilder's book stands above the pack. It's a tour de force. She does a terrific job of presenting the dynamics of scientific discovery with extraordinary flair. It is as if the reader is a fly on the wall during the many important discoveries and debates that have fueled the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Many of the great minds that have contributed to the advance of quantum physics over the past century come to life in Gilder's book. We see the humanness that exists along side the genius. There is a wonderful complexity to scientific discovery that is not well appreciated by the masses. Gilder's book illuminates that complexity in splendid fashion. This book is a treasure. I congratulate the author on her fine accomplishment, and enthusiastically encourage readers to purchase a copy of The Age of Entanglement. It's the kind of book that is difficult to put down and you don't want to end. Five stars for the book and one more star for the incredible effort that it took to produce it.
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