Customer Reviews

The Physics of Chance: From Blaise Pascal to Niels Bohr

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If you ever read one book on quantum theory, then this is the book you should read. Especially if you want to understand Bell's Inequality and how the experiments done by Alain Aspect in the 1980's verified that the inequality is violated.

I first heard of Bell's inequality and the EPR Paradox while reading an article by David Mermin in "Science News" and did not understand it at all. Then I read Robert Adair's account of it in "The Great Design" (a good book to have) and I began to gain a rudimentary appreciation of what was going on. But it wasn't until I read Ruhla's "Physics of Chance" that I learned how to derive the predictions of quantum theory - the predictions which show that two distant objects can exert influence on one another, "faster than the speed of light."

But Bell's Inequality is not the only subject in here. The text begins with rather simple treatments of probability, applied to coin tosses and telephone queues, on to Boltzmann Statistics, and then finally to quantum theory. So as your reading through the chapters in the book, you pick up the "tools" you need as you go along, in order to understand the more difficult material later on.

Ruhla's writing style is engaging, although silly at times. ...

This book is extraordinarily well written and illustrated. It introduces the major themes of statistical physics at a level that shold be readily accessible to senior undergraduates or scientists and engineers who are non-specialists. Highly recommended; a gem!

For anyone not afraid of a little mathematics and graphs, this book provides a wonderful account of some of the ways in which probability plays a role in physics. It takes a selection of standard topics but treats them in a serious, careful and well written way, via a "horizontal integration" of math theory, its meaning within physics and its experimental verification. Topics include measurement error, the Maxwell velocity distribution for an ideal gas, Boltzmann's statistical physics, deterministic chaos illustrated by a compass needle undergoing forced oscillations, a detailed account of the quantum theory of interference and an "inseparable photons" experiment. For an introduction to these subjects, this book is surely better than your college textbook.