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Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2009

only five of these were science books. Here they are, with the Book Review’s comments:

The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. Gilder’s book brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities, which she handles with verve.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes. The twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate through this study of “the second scientific revolution.”

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, by Bill Streever. From the physics of absolute zero to the cold-resistant gluttony of small birds, Streever reports on the extreme regions of low temperatures and the scientists who love them.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, by Steven Johnson. A satisfying genre-blending consideration of Joseph Priestley and his fertile ideas.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (which I reviewed in the New York Times Book Review!!) The quantum pioneer had an almost miraculous apprehension of the physical world, coupled with an innocent incomprehension of other people.

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“I found myself swept away by the stories of those brilliant young minds

who were able to conceptualize such curious things.”

-Francis Ford Coppola

“Witty, charming, and accurate….There are many books out there on the history or foundations of quantum mechanics…, but none take the unique approach that Gilder has—to focus on the quantum weirdness of entanglement itself as her book’s unifying theme and to present it in an inviting and accessible way….I was enthralled.”

-Jonathan Dowling, Science

“A delightfully unconventional history in the form of conversations–real or reconstructed–among the physicists themselves….[The book] brings the scientist actors to life as complex personalities with interesting lives….Gilder has done her homework.”

-Don Howard, Nature

“A sparkling, original book….Gilder brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities handled with a verve reminiscent of Jeremy Bernstein’s scientific portraits in The New Yorker….Gilder beautifully evokes [the experimentalists’] world: equipment catalogs instead of books; piles of dry ice; messy clockwork; boiling metal….Quantum physics lives.”

-Peter Galison, The New York Times Book Review

“She tells the story extremely well….She does an excellent job of conveying a sense of the way in which physics actually progresses…. Try to tell [the general public] that physics at the highest level does, in its way, demand as much passion and imagination and creativity as music or literature and you are likely to be met with a look of blank incomprehension…. But telling people is one thing, making them really feel it is quite another. Gilder does the latter.“

-Marcus Appleby, American Journal of Physics (full text below)

“The book reads like a good novel, and I found it just as hard to put down….And it is not just a lively retelling of an old, familiar story. I was surprised by Gilder’s version of the celebrated exchange between Bohr and Einstein at the 1930 Solvay Conference… and now [after looking up her source] find it quite convincing….Gilder is a fine storyteller who brings to life one of the great scientific adventures of our time.”

-David Mermin, American Scientist

★ “[This] fast-paced history . . . is less simplified than other popular accounts, but those who pay attention will find it highly rewarding. A tour-de-force by a talented young author who makes a difficult subject accessible.”

-Kirkus, starred review (full text below)

“A captivating new book….Gilder creates a movingly human and surprisingly accessible picture of the unveiling of the quantum universe–one of the most infuriating, counter-intuitive, and yet crucial concepts of all time….Admirably lucid.”

-Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“A meticulous, splendid introduction to quantum theory, not by way of stark theoretical abstracts, which loom like splinters of ice in darkest isolation, but by way of the people who discovered the theories….Those who parade before us are as fascinating as their ideas: musicians, skiers, hikers, divers interact and battle….[A] superb book.”

-Sam Coale, Providence Journal

“Normally, I would avoid a book like Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement, which wraps around a particular concept of quantum physics….Gilder’s enjoyable, revealing book, however, is as much about the personalities of famous scientists as their theories…. [Her] technique could have come off as a horrible gimmick, but instead, it wonderfully captures the uncertainty of science and the excitement of discovery.”

-Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer

★ “No book more fully delivers the creative excitement of science.”

-Booklist, starred review (full text below)

“This is not the textbook one would pick up in order to learn quantum mechanics, but it is the book one should read before that first textbook on the subject….
Gilder is a phenomenal writer.”

-Frank L. Cloutier, The Charleston Post & Courier

“This is not a book about quantum mechanics. This is a book about how science is done. It is the clearest and most intriguing history of the manner in which the scientific method continues to advance knowledge (in spite of–or even because of–the people involved in the investigations) that I’ve ever read.”

-Kel Munger, Sacramento News & Review

“Drawn from published papers and personal letters, the words of these scientists meld to form a coherent narrative of a fascinating field.”

-The Strand Bookstore

“I’m sure this will give historians fits, but aside from some stilted language, it worked for me.”

-James Trefil, Washington Post

“It is a remarkable achievement–fifty-eight pages of endnotes give some idea of how much Gilder integrates into the text (and where it’s all coming from)….– and an enjoyable read. One does hesitate to praise — much less endorse — her re-creative method, for fear that others will try their hand at it as well. (We’d be all for a warning label: don’t try this at home)….[But] Gilder is both meticulous and thoughtful, and has the results to show for it. Well worthwhile.”

-The Complete Review

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see reviews of the wonderful cover.
see other covers designed by Jason Booher.

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American Journal of Physics, Vol. 77, No. 10, October 2009

Marcus Appleby, Reviewer.

To the world-at-large, Einstein’s name is indelibly associated with the theory of relativity. But to Einstein himself, relativity was only “a sort of respite which I gave myself during my struggles with the quanta” (p. 54). It was a struggle he lost. Shortly before his death, almost half a century after his 1905 photoelectric paper, he resignedly wrote “All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken” (p. 328).

One way or another, the question is still with us. Of course now, as then, there is no shortage of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys who will confidently tell you the answer. But since they say different things, the skeptic is entitled to suspect that no one really knows. And that is the subject of Gilder’s book: The struggle to make sense of quantum mechanics.

Her subject is much broader than her title might suggest. When I picked up the book, I assumed it would be about the revolution in quantum information theory of the past 2 or 3 decades. But, in fact, in a book of over 400 pages, she devotes a mere 44 pages to recent developments, and even in that small space there is remarkably little about the practical details of quantum computation and cryptography.

Instead, her focus is on the ideas: Specifically the ideas over which Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger fought their battles and which continued to obsess Bohm, Bell, and a handful of others during the long years when an interest in such questions was liable to do serious damage to one’s career. Experiments are not ignored. For example, she gives a long and fascinating “behind-the-scenes” account of early attempts to test the Bell inequalities. However, experiments are only of interest to her to the extent they illustrate or are otherwise directly related to her central theme: The quantum enigma, as it might be called. The same is true of her attitude to quantum information. Her interest in quantum computation and cryptography stems largely, if not entirely, from the fact that they show, contrary to what was long assumed, that the work of Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Bell has important practical implications.

She tells the story extremely well. Her account is packed with a richness and depth of historical detail that is most unusual in a book intended for the general reader. I learned quite a few things I did not know before. But even when I did know what was coming next, the book continued to hold my interest in the way that an old and familiar story always can be found interesting if the telling of it is sufficiently good.

What is most distinctive about the book is the way she tries to tell the story from the inside, as it were. As she remarks, the impression physics textbooks give to students is of a “perfect sculpture sitting in a vacuum-sealed case, as if brains, only tenuously connected to bodies, had given birth to insights fully formed.” Gilder seeks to correct that impression.

In her words: “As Tom Wolfe wrote at the beginning of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: ‘I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that.’ Wolfe was recounting a very different kind of mental history, but his point, I find, is even more true about the portentous history of science and intellect that unfolded as the age of entanglement.”

I had some reservations about this at first, particularly her use of imaginary conversations between the main protagonists, which I feared would turn out to be nothing more than a cheap gimmick. But, in fact, it works very well. She does an excellent job of conveying a sense of the way in which physics actually progresses.

Gilder’s evocation of the subjective reality of physical thinking should go some way toward dispelling a serious and, I believe, dangerous fallacy. Based on what is, admittedly, some very restricted and unsystematic sampling, I have the impression that it is widely believed among the general public that physics is the production of (at best) a bunch of geeks or (at worst) a bunch of robots who have failed their Turing test. Try to tell them that physics at the highest level does, in its way, demand as much passion and imagination and creativity as music or literature and you are likely to be met with a look of blank incomprehension. I think this is, as I said, dangerous because in a democracy it is the general public who ultimately call the shots, and if physics is not strongly rooted in the wider culture it will, I fear, eventually wither and die. Of course, there is no shortage of popular science writers who will tell their readers that science is wonderful and exciting. But telling people is one thing, making them really feel it is quite another. Gilder does the latter.

I believe her book could also be read with profit by all the politicians and government officials who, in Britain at least, seem to imagine that ideas can be squeezed out of creative thinkers by applying the same managerial techniques that are used in a juice-bottling factory. It might make them realize that (as Einstein put it) “the state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”* The activity is spontaneous, even anarchic. Try to bureaucratically control it and you will end by destroying it.

Last but not least I think her book can be read with profit by physicists. I believe that students would find it inspiring, and I think that even the old hands should find it enjoyable and even educative as I have done.

I should perhaps conclude with a couple of cautionary notes. I said, and I think it is true, that students would find the book inspiring. But they should be warned that it is not a textbook on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. For example, she devotes 50 pages to Bohm but barely mentions other significant figures, such as Wheeler or Everett. I think that is fair enough given her focus on entanglement and the Bell inequalities, and given her wish to evoke the subjective inwardness of the process of scientific discovery by giving in-depth portraits of a few individuals. However it is important that a student who reads the book should not be under the misapprehension that it says everything important there is to say about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Students should also be warned that the author is a little prone to careless mistakes. For instance, she says or at least implies that when, in the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, an electron makes a jump, the frequency of the emitted photon is the mean of the frequencies of the initial and final orbits p. 34 . Students should be aware that, if they are puzzled by something she says, the fault may lie with her rather than with them.

D. M. Appleby is a Senior Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and a visiting researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He has published widely on quantum information and the foundations of quantum mechanics.

* Address by Albert Einstein on Max Planck’s 60th birthday 1918, online at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~slu/on_research/einstein_essay2.html .

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Booklist, Nov. 15, 2008:

Gilder has taken to heart Heisenberg’s declaration that ’science is rooted in conversations.’  By recounting decisive conversations between researchers, she illuminates the tortuous path of quantum mechanics.

Readers eavesdrop, for instance, on Schrödinger — sick and bed-bound — as he challenges Bohr’s dismissal of pictorial thinking. They listen in as Einstein pauses on a train platform to urge de Broglie to press his quixotic fight against quantum orthodoxy. Gradually, the realization dawns that the formulas of physics come from cross-grained personalities, animated by unpredictable emotions.

The literal-minded may question the imaginative liberties Gilder takes in converting passages from letters and memoirs into face-to-face exchanges. But most readers will relish the psychological interplay she depicts. The character of the brash young John Bell emerges in such interplay, as he disputes the reasoning of a colleague smugly certain that no ‘hidden variables’ inhere in quantum events.

For in reacting against that smugness, Bell launches an epoch-making inquiry into the way subatomic particles remain linked — entangled — after separation. Lamentably, Bell dies before his findings open exciting new vistas in quantum computing. But this compelling history of his accomplishment will stimulate more of the seminal conversations that generate new science. No book more fully delivers the creative excitement of science.

–Bryce Christensen, Booklist, starred review

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Kirkus Reviews:

Fast-paced history from debut author Gilder, who employs invented but historically accurate dialogue to surprisingly good effect, revealing the personalities as well as the ideas of quantum physicists.

Though generally viewed as a gigantic achievement of human genius, quantum physics, which describes the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, is also a troubling field. Its predictions have proven dazzlingly accurate, but they predict miniscule objects behaving in ways that everyone, physicists included, finds bizarre. In the subatomic world, observers can never locate an object precisely, only determine the probability that it will be in one place instead of another. Energy and matter behave as either solid particles or waves depending on the experiment performed.

Most physicists were happy that quantum physics worked so well, but Einstein insisted that this relentless indeterminacy could not be true. In 1935, he and two co-workers devised the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen “thought experiment” (”thought” because it was considered technically impossible). If two subatomic particles are “entangled,” a state that obeys quantum laws, and then separated, changing one affects the other even if it’s very far away. Since this is clearly impossible, Einstein concluded that quantum theory was defective.

Gilder, remarkably well-informed, delivers a comprehensive history that begins with early 20th-century giants Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Pauli. However, she differs from the authors of similar books in devoting even more space to less celebrated but equally brilliant physicists from the century’s latter half, including David Bohm, Anton Zeilinger, and John Bell. Her inspiration is Bell, who died in 1990 before getting the Nobel Prize everyone agrees he deserved. His 1964 paper, showing that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment did not disprove quantum theory, inspired a generation of researchers who have clarified quantum physics without rendering it less bizarre.

Although aimed at general readers, this work is less simplified than other popular accounts, but those who pay attention will find it highly rewarding. A tour-de-force by a talented young author who makes a difficult subject accessible.

–Kirkus Reviews, starred review.

From the jacket:

“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

“Louisa Gilder breathes new life into a story of intellectual daring and makes its protagonists come alive. A deep, beautiful, and thoroughly original book.”

-George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

“The Age of Entanglement is a marvelous guide to the endlessly fascinating mystery of quantum mechanics–and to the equally fascinating way some of the world’s smartest scientists have wrestled with understanding it.”

-Charles C. Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus