Customer Reviews

Where Does The Weirdness Go?: Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a good discussion of quantum mechanics (particularly the Copenhagen interpretation) for the layman. Many books have been written that try to make QM more mysterious than it really is. This one strikes the right balance. My only complaints are that (1) the author often repeats himself, (2) his writing style uses a lot of redundancy, and (3) he keeps saying the same thing over and over.

The point of this book is to convince the reader of the validity of what it known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm's hidden-variable theory and Everett's multi-universe theory are briefly explained, then dismissed. The author concludes that "in quantum mechanics nature is, at the most fundamental level, genuinely unknowable, but despite that, the world at large, the world of which quantum mechanics is the foundation, can be known and understood." This is the author's interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation.

The book is written in an entertaining and engaging style without any equations or graphs. The intended audience seems to be non-scientists who have some understanding of quantum mechanics (apparently gained from reading other works on QM aimed at non-scientists) and who are in need of a detailed and full explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation.

By the end of the book, I felt I fully understood the author's point, but I was not convinced that his interpretation is the only possibly valid interpretation. The author might be disappointed in this as he seemed very eager to convince the reader of his opinion. Although I am glad I have read the book because I did learn much, my complaint is that the author seemed to have an agenda and was not dispassionately explaining the current state of knowledge in the field.

I freely admit to being math impaired, so while this book may not meet the highest benchmark of the more initiated, I found it a delight to read. I felt the author explained the topic clearly for those of us who do not routinely subscribe to physics or math journals. For most of us, the sciences are rather arcane subjects approached with caution if not down right suspicion. That's really too bad, especially for scientists. They'd probably get more financial support from those of us who feel like outsiders if we better understood something of their fields. Certainly Feynman and Sagan were brilliant at putting this across in their time. If those who would pooh-pooh this or any other book like it would have the rest of us better educated in the topics dear to their heart, it might behove them to direct us to better ones.

The realm of quantum mechanics lies well beyond the range of direct human perception. What we do "see" when we try, only complicates things. Lindley's treatment of the fundamental problems with QM in "Wierdness", represents one the best non-technical approaches that has ever been attempted. Much better than Gribbin, and more thought provoking than Rae, Lindley's book is perfect for every physicist whom has ever tried to explain his/her life's passion to friends or family over coffee or at the dinner table. I wish I had read this while I was an undergraduate.

Everyone seems to love Stephen Hawking for stepping down from the genius podium and writing for the layman, and they should. Lindley however, actually writes quite the entertaining book, you can tell he had a lot of fun with it.
Further, Lindley does an excellent job of not only making quantum mechanics understandable (as if that wasn't hard enough already), but again, all in an interesting way. For example, it seemed like he had 100 different ways to jovially refer to the death of Schrodinger's cat.
On the downside, Lindley does beat you over the head going over some things repeatedly, but at least he's making sure you've got a principle down and have remembered it. It also seems that he takes 200 pages to build up to decoherence, but then just hopes you'll buy into it without much explanation as to why. Then again, such an explanation might've been too much for the layman.
All in all, this is a great place to start for anyone who's ever wonedered about QM or just wants to impress their friends. Lindley does a good job of explaining a lot of the philosophical implications as well.

I was very dissapointed by this book. This was the first book I have read about quantum mechanics, and while this was written for a beginner, it is not a good place to start. Lindley does a good job in the first half of the book explaining the origins and different views of quantum mechanics. If he had stopped the book there he may have gotten 4 starts. Unfortunately, he keeps going. And he keeps repeating himself. Did I mention he reapeats himself? A lot? I would estimate that a good 25 (and that's a very conservative estimate) pages or more could be removed without anyone even noticing, since he constantly repeats the same thing over and over and over and over.

The second problem I had with the book was his poor logic. Towards the end of the book he attempts to explain the Schroedinger's cat and Einstein's moon problems. And he does an awful job of it. In both cases he attacks the example instead of the problem that spawned the example. In the case of Schroedinger's cat, he even does a very poor job of attacking the example. He ends up saying that the cat would be in a half-dead/half-alive state for an immeasurably small time before the movement of atoms would force it to assume either a dead or alive state. He then assumes that the problem is solved. Unfortunately, it isn't. Even if the time spent in the half-dead/half-alive state is extremely short, it still occurs, and the problem is still there. Secondly, he then is forced to admit that by his logic, it is possible (but extremely improbable) that the cat could, after being dead, suddenly assume a half-dead/half-alive state, and from there go to the alive state. As you can see, his explanation ends up being worse that Schroedinger's cat, which simply stayed in the half-dead/half-alive state until someone looked at it, and then it stayed either alive or dead.

In the case of Einstein's moon, he once again attacks the example instead of the problem behind the example, and once again he does a poor job of it. Einstein asked the question, if no atom has specific properties unless measured, is the moon, which is made up of an enormous quantity of atoms, really there if no one is looking at it? Lindley, instead of addressing the problem behind the example, which is "do things exist if not being measured?", instead simply addresses the specific example of the moon. He says that the moon exists because it is constantly being bombarded by photons from the sun, which are a sufficient measurement to keep the moon measured at all times, so that it will always be there whether we are looking at it or not. First off, how is it that he tries to solve the problem of the cat by saying that the movement of atoms keeps something from being in an indeterminite state, but here he resorts to photons from the sun instead of the atoms which make up the moon to do that? Secondly, he doesn't address the problem of whether the moon would be there if photons weren't hitting it. Thirdly, he has to conclude that according to his logic, that the moon could (though it is extremely improbable) suddenly pop onto the other side of it's orbit. Once again, he attacks the wrong thing, and even this misdirected attack is a poor one.

Since I am not very knowledgeable in quantum mechanics, I cannot say whether his actual science is reliable or not. I am restrained only to critique his logic, since even a non-scientist can see that his logic is very flawed.

Such an interesting topic has been approached in better ways by other authors (i.e. Alastair Rae). The wordiness at the wrong places, and lack of clarity in the explanations are probably this book most serious drawbacks.

Lindley is definitly a copenhagen follower. His book essentially promotes the faith of the copenhagen interpetation. He seems to miss the main problem of this interpetation that at some point the mathematics stops and a physicist has to "collapse" the wave function by hand. Spending pages or books explaining this manual,nonmathematical procedures exemplifies the problem. Lindley spends chapters on decoherence but fails to mention still that the pure state is still chosen somehow manually not mathematically.

NOTHING IN THE MATH TELLS US TO DO THIS. How Lindley avoids this point in an entire book written to explain the wierdness of quantum mechanics shows how much he is indoctrinated in the FAITH.

He also misses that the main point of the Bohm interpetation is NOT that it is deterministic but that it allows the math to predict outcomes and avoids any manual type crossing out of equations or choosing a pure state by a physicist.

I would actually give this book four stars if it was purely an introduction to quantum at a lay level. It covers the basics well, but I would have liked more examples. For instance, the entire discussion of where the weirdness comes _from_ is based on a single experiment, and his explaination of this experiment left me with many ways to wiggle around it with classical explainations.

On the other hand I would have to give this book only two stars as an explaination of where the weirdness goes. Basically the claim is that the weirdness is washed away through the process of continual interactions -- sure, a virtual particle in a virtual box is "weird", but these things don't exist in the real world.

But that doesn't really explain anything. The problem is not _when_ the weirdness goes away, but _where_. To be technical, the proper question is "what is wavefunction collapse?" The book offers no clues on this point. So if you don't really know what you're looking for it would seem his explainations make sense, but if you have even a passing knowledge of the topic (which is all I have) the whole thing feels empty.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I have read other books about quantum physics and found this one to be most down-to-earth and easy to relate to. Physics majors and scientists, relax. This book is not directed towards you. It is directed towards laymen without a strong foundation in science, and it succeeds very well in its goals. It is readable, refreshing and makes deep concepts almost tangible.