Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it's not really telling us that "weird" things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don't seem obvious or right at all--or even possible.

An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means--and what it doesn't. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge--about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn't a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called "weird," it's us.

ISBN-13: 9780226558387

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 10-18-2018

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.

What People are Saying About This

“This is the clearest and most insightful description of quantum enigmas that I have ever read. I kept being astonished at how Ball seemed to make one mystery after another vanish. He makes quantum mysteries disappear without removing their uncanniness. Brilliant and innovative, Beyond Weird may alter how quantum mechanics is taught not only to the public but also to physicists. I suspect that teachers of introductory quantum mechanics will be paraphrasing or outright quoting this book for decades.”

Robert P. Crease

“This is the clearest and most insightful description of quantum enigmas that I have ever read. I kept being astonished at how Ball seemed to make one mystery after another vanish. He makes quantum mysteries disappear without removing their uncanniness. Brilliant and innovative, Beyond Weird may alter how quantum mechanics is taught not only to the public but also to physicists. I suspect that teachers of introductory quantum mechanics will be paraphrasing or outright quoting this book for decades.”

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Table of Contents

No one can say what quantum mechanics means (and this is a book about it)

Quantum mechanics is not really about the quantum

Quantum objects are neither wave nor particle (but sometimes they might as well be)

Quantum particles aren’t in two states at once (but sometimes they might as well be)

What ‘happens’ depends on what we find out about it

There are many ways of interpreting quantum theory (and none of them quite makes sense)

Whatever the question, the answer is ‘Yes’ (unless it’s ‘No’)

Not everything is knowable at once

The properties of quantum objects don’t have to be contained within the objects

There is no ‘spooky action at a distance’

The everyday world is what quantum becomes at human scales

Everything you experience is a (partial) copy of what causes it

Schrödinger’s cat has had kittens

Quantum mechanics can be harnessed for technology

Quantum computers don’t necessarily perform ‘many calculations at once’

There is no other ‘quantum’ you

Things could be even more ‘quantum’ than they are (so why aren’t they)?

The fundamental laws of quantum mechanics might be simpler than we imagine

Can we ever get to the bottom of it?

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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