The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (Vintage) [Paperback]

Louisa Gilder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1400095263 | ISBN-13: 978-1400095261

In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected–a phenomenon which he derisively described as “spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation “entanglement.” Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist John Bell demonstrated just how strange this entanglement really was. Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing the scientists’ own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. The result is a richly illuminating exploration of one of the most exciting concepts of quantum physics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The story of quantum mechanics and its lively cast of supporters, heretics and agnostics has always fascinated science historians and popular science readers. Gilder's version differs from the familiar tale in two important ways. First, by focusing on the problem of entanglement—the supposed telepathic connection between particles that a skeptical Einstein called spooky action-at-a-distance—Gilder includes more recent developments leading to quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Second, Gilder exercises—not wholly successfully—a daring creative license, drawing excerpts from papers, journals and letters to construct dialogues among the scientists. Science is rooted in conversations, Werner Heisenberg once wrote, and Gilder's created conversations reveal personalities as well as thought processes: Do you really believe the moon is not there if no one looks? asks Einstein. Less comfortable aspects of the era are also part of Gilder's story, the uncertainty and fear as one scientist after another fled Nazi Germany, the paranoia of the Manhattan Project and the McCarthy era. Gilder's history is rife with curious characters and dramatizes how difficult it was for even these brilliant scientists to grasp the paradigm-changing concepts of quantum science. 20 illus., 15 by the author. (Nov. 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Captivating. . . . A movingly human and surprisingly accessible picture of the unveiling of the quantum universe. . . . Admirably lucid.” —Chicago Tribune

“A sparkling, original book. . . . Gilder brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities handled with a verve reminiscent of Jeremy Berstein’s scientific portraits in The New Yorker. . . . What had been for generations a story of theoretical malcontents now intrigues spooks and start-ups. All this radiates from Louisa Gilder’s story. Quantum physics lives.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Highly entertaining. . . . Hard to put down. . . . Grippingly readable. . . . Gilder is a fine storyteller who brings to life one of the great scientific adventures of our time.” —American Scientist

“[A] fascinating yarn. . . . For anyone who wants to understand the human angle of modern physics and separate quirks from quarks, this is your book.” —The Providence Journal (A Best Book of 2008)

“A witty, charming, and accurate account of the history of that bugaboo of physics–quantum entanglement . . . There are many books out there on the history or foundations of quantum mechanics.  Some are more technical, others more historical, but none take the unique approach that Gilder has–to focus on the quantum weirdness of entanglement itself as her book’s unifying them and to present it in an inviting and accessible way . . . Delightful.” —Science

“Astonishing. . . . The courage and even audacity of a nonscientist to investigate the evolution of ideas about the most esoteric aspects of quantum physics are truly remarkable. . . . Gilder is a phenomenal writer.” —Charleston Post & Courier

“A welcome addition to the genre. . . . [Gilder’s] book really shines . . . [She] proves that the neglected last fifty years of quantum mechanics is . . . full of brilliant, quirky personalities and mind-bending discoveries. . . . She is a very compelling writer, and she clearly understands what makes science exciting and science history interesting.” —ScientificBlogging.com

“The clearest and most intriguing history of the manner in which the scientific method continues to advance knowledge. An amazing story.” —Sacramento News & Review

“A delightfully unconventional history. . . . Especially enjoyable are the portraits of the less famous physicists . . . Gilder has done her homework.” —Nature

“[Gilder] displays an ability to capture a personality in a few words.” —The Washington Post

“An admirable, unexpected book, historically sound and seamlessly constructed, that transports those of us who do not understand quantum mechanics into the lives and thoughts of those who did.” —George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines

“Louisa Gilder disentangles the story of entanglement with such narrative panache, such poetic verve and such metaphorical precision that for a moment I almost thought I understood quantum mechanics.” —Matt Ridley, author of Genome

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400095263
• ISBN-13: 978-1400095261
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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

By 

Bret Swanson (Zionsville, IN) - See all my reviews
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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

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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."

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too Ambitious; Not Enough Detail, June 6, 2009

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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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.

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

By 

Steve Waite (Shelton, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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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.