Louisa Gilder lives in Tyringham, Western Massachusetts.

(See below for the texts of two interviews, one by Knopf and one by Powells.com.)

KNOPF INTERVIEW

This is an unusual book. It is full of dialogues between the great quantum physicists which you have put together using quotes from their letters and memoirs. Why would you write the book this way?

Good question. To put words–even their own words–into the mouths of the likes of Einstein and Niels Bohr seems risky or self-indulgent or disrespectful or all of the above. History is about what really happened, not about some overconfident young author playing around with it. But in this case, what really happened was a lot of misunderstanding, talking at cross-purposes, social conditioning–normal life, in other words.

What happens when you outline the history of entanglement in a straightforward way, with no conversations or arguments, is one of two things. Either Bohr becomes demonized (and Einstein beatified) or Einstein becomes infantilized (and Bohr beatified). I’m overstating it, but not by much. I’ve seen both stereotypes again and again as I read peoples’ assessments of the situation. But if Bohr was a demon or Einstein an infant, then how could they have been such good friends with such a high level of respect for each other throughout their lives? I kept finding that my (and other science writers’) descriptions of the history were not doing justice to the complex interrelations of the physicists, the passion and humor with which they regarded their subject, and the immense importance of a few historically documented conversations.

But it took a full two years of writing and research before I started to think that evoking those conversations through appropriate quotes from the people involved might be the best way to present the subject.

You spent eight and a half years writing and researching the book, is that right?

Yes.

So, after two years, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to show the reader what the history felt like as it was unfolding. Reading Tom Wolfe when I was seventeen or eighteen made a huge impression on me, particularly The Right Stuff (where he describes the early history of space exploration through its complicated familial relationship with high-speed stunt flying), and I wished I could read a Right Stuff of Quantum Physics. What was it really like for the key players at the time the crucial decisions and discoveries were being made? The history of quantum-mechanical entanglement is just not a straightforward subject. Not only is quantum mechanics in general famously tricky to put into words, but I’m not even telling the standard victor’s-history of quantum mechanics. Most of my book is about lines of inquiry that were, until very recently, deemed failures by most of the people competent to judge. But–and here’s the point–these lines of inquiry were dismissed mostly for sociological reasons. I would argue that the thing that really hurt David Bohm’s career in the fifties was not that he was a Marxist (which lost him his job), but that he was trying to follow Einstein in asking questions he wasn’t supposed to ask about quantum mechanics. That put him beyond the pale.

It turns out that for the unfolding of this history, the working styles of two of the greatest quantum physicists, Einstein and Bohr, had a far bigger impact than the merit of their ideas. Bohr was happiest surrounded with students, and he built a famous institute in Copenhagen for that purpose, while Einstein once said he wished he was a lighthouse keeper. Positive things came out of both the convivial and the solitary approaches, but negative things did, too. Either way, it’s non-scientific influences crucially affecting the course of science.

But isn’t the scientific method there to protect science from irrelevant, personal influences?

That’s the idea, but how does science really unfold? Heisenberg claimed at the start of his intellectual autobiography (and I quote him at the beginning of my book) that “Science is rooted in conversations.” Well, think of a recent conversation you observed or participated in. Was it a case of two people logically working their way through their understanding of the situation, exposing each others’ biases, and finally arriving at a conclusion which encapsulates the best explanation of the known data? That’s pretty rare even in an essay. In my experience, conversations are just as much–if not more–influenced by irrelevant interpersonal dynamics (differing levels of charisma and social standing, whether or not each person can really listen to the other, and so on) than by the quest for truth and understanding. And this is even more true for the heightened emotional state that happens in arguments, which is, when you look at the memoirs, what a lot of those conversations Heisenberg is referring to really were, including the famous time that Bohr drove Heisenberg to tears.

The story becomes almost inexplicable–and certainly less true–if we treat all the people involved as mathematical machines, and any departure from the scientific method as the machine damnably running off its rails.

The von Neumann quote at the beginning of your book says, “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

Exactly. Life is incredibly rich; even the life of a fly, let alone the life of Einstein or von Neumann or Bohr or Heisenberg, let alone the complicated interactions between all these people.

How to we classify this book? Do you think of it as history of science? as a textbook? as a story?

It’s an invitation to think about science. These days there is a lot of worry about fundamentalist approaches to religion and the dangers such simplistic thinking poses for the world. My worry is a related one: I see an atmosphere of fundamentalism with respect to science, and I think that that is dangerous. Newspapers and magazines use the phrases “scientists say” or “studies show” as a proof, in the same spirit as the most vociferous young-earth creationist references a verse in Genesis. When you talk to scientists–people whose lives are devoted to furthering humankind’s understanding of the world–they often cringe at the over-simplicity, over-finality, and sensationalism of the popular accounts of science.

So my book is partially an attempt to show how science really happens, because if you know that, you’re far more likely to ask questions and see the world as full of wonder, than to receive as Holy Writ some journalist’s oversimplification of a scientific idea or consensus. (Think about “scientists say.” What does that even mean? You’d never see “politicians say” or “writers say.”) Scientific consensus is useful, but so is scientific dissidence.

So I’d love it if my book encouraged people to ask questions and not be satisfied with simplistic, pat, or popular answers. And though it’s definitely not a textbook (which would be written by a professional physicist), it makes me so happy when the book serves as an introduction to quantum physics that inspires people to want to learn more.

The first time I realized the book could have that effect was in 2006 when I was working as a goatherd. I’ve supported myself with various odd jobs during the last eight years–house-sitting, research-assistantship, movie projection, and the non-job of moving back in with my parents–and I spent 2006 working on a goat dairy farm in coastal Northern California. I tended the goats, milked, made cheese, and then retreated to my yurt to edit the book, which was something like six hundred pages long at the time. And the owner of the farm would try to get me to send my current draft to her friend, Herschel Snodgrass, a physics professor at Lewis and Clark. But I resisted, not wanting to burden a physicist I didn’t know with this huge and somewhat unorthodox manuscript. So finally she took my book and Xeroxed it herself and sent it to her friend. Well, it turned out he was teaching an intro-to-quantum-mechanics class, and really thinking about the issues that come up in my book. So he made copies for the students, who read it alongside the real textbook. And they loved it–they really responded to the humanity behind these names they only knew as hallowed adjectives (the Bohr atom, the Schrödinger equation, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). That year Herschel was runner-up for Lewis and Clark Teacher of the Year, and the students who voted for him all mentioned his unconventional approach to teaching quantum mechanics in using this book.

How did you yourself relate to these towering geniuses whom you wrote about?

Well, I’m a cross-country skier, and so I really enjoyed discovering how many of my main “characters” were, too–including Schrödinger, Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and John Bell. I would venture to say that most of the quantum physicists were mountaineers or walkers, including Dirac who made long, long walks out in the open fields every day in his black formal suit and even wore it climbing trees (to prepare for mountaineering). Einstein, who thought mountaineering was for the goats, was an avid sailor, as were Bohr and the two experimentalists who tested entanglement in the lab, Clauser and Aspect.

What was the hardest thing about writing this book?

You know, I think it was two of the biographies I read.

(Which is funny because one of the best things about writing this book was also reading two biographies!–James Gleick’s life of Feynman, Genius, and George Johnson’s life of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty. These are two of my favorite books, period.)

But it was very hard for me to read the biographies of Paul Ehrenfest (who ended up committing suicide in 1933) and David Bohm (who suffered from not always unjustified paranoia). You end up suffering with them, and it’s pretty hard to write in a state of bleak, uncomfortable demoralization. It also felt a little indecent to be looking so closely at private and agonized thoughts which were never meant for the world to see. And it’s easy to get too invested. I became fascinated by Oppenheimer–as many people who knew him in real life were–and then devastated by his betrayal of Bohm, his student. How do you convey it all, staying true to the subject, but with a light enough touch so that it’s readable?

In general it was hard for me initially to come to terms with the fact that the subjects of my book were human, not infallible prophets of science. (After all, I started working on this book when I was an idealistic and naïve twenty-one-year-old.) I actually went through a phase of actively hating Oppenheimer, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg. I felt so strongly about them, which meant that their betrayals of the people who trusted them came as awful shocks–Heisenberg’s failure to try to protect his Jewish friends during the Holocaust, and the married Schrödinger’s dalliances with young women, hit me like a personal injury. I know it’s ridiculous to talk this way about people who are dead now and wouldn’t know me from Eve, but I went through my twenties with these folks as my constant companions.

It takes a long time to learn that you can love people and admire them for the things they did well even though they’re not saints or supermen. I’ve just turned thirty, and as I’ve gotten a bit older I’ve learned to live with the contradictions. There was one moment which I remember vividly that helped me see how complicated life is, and how redemption happens. I had really identified with one of those young women, Itha Junger, whose four-year-long affair with Schrödinger covered her late teens and ended with a bad abortion that left her unable to have children. So it happened that I was at a physics conference in Vienna and the rumor was that Schrödinger’s grandson was there. I had never heard of Schrödinger’s grandchildren, let alone that one of them was a physicist. Meeting Terry Rudolph, I felt that I had suddenly jumped backwards in time, because here I was in Vienna and he–even with an Australian accent and AC/DC shirt–looked exactly like Schrödinger, not only looked like him but had the same almost magically perfect (and humorous) writing style, and independent, questioning approach to quantum physics. He had learned who his grandfather was only after he had become a physicist himself. Not only had he become a physicist without knowing his connection to Schrödinger, but he was inspired to do so by the work of John Bell on entanglement–a direct result of Schrödinger’s own work and preoccupations.

And in fact, his grandmother was another of those young women–her life thrown into chaos by her unwed pregnancy–in whose defense I had once hated Schrödinger. But here was this clear, original thinker, her grandson, carrying along the same lines of inquiry that his grandfather had started. And I realized that stories don’t end–life goes on. But in story-telling, we frame a stretch of life and artificially give it a beginning and an end. And it’s just where you stop telling the story that makes all the difference.

POWELL’S INTERVIEW

Describe your book.

I’ve just finished my history of entanglement, the phenomenon Schrödinger called “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.” It’s one of the things that makes quantum mechanics so much like magic. If two particles–atoms, photons of light, electrons, etc., in any combination–interact and then separate, the laws of quantum physics do not regard the distance between them as meaningful. As far as the equations are concerned, the objects are one, no matter how far apart they might be.

In interacting with one of these entangled particles, we both discover and destroy their unity. If we touch one particle, it seems that the other, untouched particle, reacts–a description of events which Einstein famously ridiculed as “spooky action at a distance.” However it happens (and the how is still a mystery), this correlation was first demonstrated in the lab in 1972 over a distance of twelve feet, and last year over ninety miles of the Atlantic between two of the Canary Islands. It has become the basis of unbreakable codes (quantum key exchange), with the potential for mind-bogglingly fast data processing (quantum computing), and is the focus of the most vibrant sections of physics departments world-wide.

So my book tells the history of this fascinating effect, from 1909 to 2008. But for all but a few years of that century, and by all but a few physicists, entanglement was ignored. This makes this an unusual history–in part, it’s a revisiting of a history (the rise and ascendancy of quantum mechanics) that is at this point very familiar to physicists and science readers, and looking at it in a different light that makes some of the “failures” look visionary.

I spent eight and a half years writing the book, and part of the struggle over those years was to work out a way to tell such a history of apparent failures and constant miscommunication. The way that the physicists’ personalities interacted with each other had a huge effect on the course that research took. I found that the history just did not make sense without taking that human interaction into effect. So I ended up writing a book which tried to place the reader in the middle of these debates and miscommunications as they were happening, to “feel” the history as it was unfolding.

What inspires you to sit down and write?

Well, I guess there’s two different pictures here. There’s the big picture–What inspires you to sit down and write at all? and there’s the practical level, which is harder–What gets you into that chair morning after morning for most of nine years?

The inspiration for the book came out of my research for my independent study in college (Dartmouth). In my junior winter, as a recently lapsed physics major, I encountered entanglement–in a philosophy class, of all places. It thrilled me; it was for discoveries like this that I had wanted to study physics in the first place! And the physics department let me do an independent study. As I did my research, I realized more and more that there was a fascinating human story to go with the fascinating physical effect. All the pieces of the story were spread out over memoirs and biographies and scientific journals and interviews, and I really longed to read a book that would collect the story in one place. I didn’t feel inspired to write it, but I felt so strongly that that book should exist.

I’ve heard writers talk about writing the book that they wished they could read, and now I understand it. That was my motivation.

But you can’t get through the day-to-day by telling yourself how much you want to read the book when it’s done. Writing is a big struggle for me, and the moments where it all flows are far fewer than I would wish; a lot of it is nit-picking and just grinding away. What’s worked best to get me to write has been ritualizing it. I’ve learned that the only way I can fight my procrastination is to start writing before anything else. Even breakfast is too distracting, let alone any morning reading (even if it’s relevant). I sit in my maternal grandmother’s chair at my paternal great-grandmother’s desk (which have both traveled in my Honda Civic across the country four times), drinking gallons of green tea, and sometimes, if I’m alone, my computer plays music that might help evoke that precious fugue state–Hildegard von Bingen, or Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach on the cello. Best was when I had moved back in with my family (in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts) and both my parents were writing books. My mother and I would work side by side in what we called “the Temple”–a beautiful room over my parents’ garage with a view of our beef cattle and the hills beyond.

Even ritual wouldn’t do it, I realize, if I wasn’t kind of obsessive and perfectionist about the book. (Of course, I already know I made mistakes that I never caught, so I was actually not obsessive and perfectionist enough.) But focusing on a tiny detail, rewriting a sentence over and over again, spending a day doing research for that sentence, and then cutting the sentence–the drive behind these non-adaptive behaviors actually is what made the book happen. And that drive is caring deeply about the subject and the people involved.

As I think about it, I think both the big picture and the little picture motivations add up to the same thing, which is love.

Describe your favorite childhood teacher and how that teacher influenced you.

My favorite was my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Lotz. Looking back, I now realize she must have been really young–maybe just out of college–but at the time, we 11-year-olds just realized she was “cool” (sometimes she wore sunglasses). To give a sense of the magic of Mrs. Lotz, one of the things she taught was sentence diagramming. Not just the “good kids,” but the whole class (about thirty kids at St. Mary’s School in Lee, MA) would be clamoring to diagram a sentence up on the board. I have no idea how she did it, but she made grammar fascinating.

But the best thing was that she taught us to write books. We would write a draft, she’d edit it, then we’d write up a neat final draft, illustrate it, and then bind it with thin, bendy cardboard and a few stitches of thread down the middle. I still have about five books I wrote over the course of that year. It was absolutely the high point of my entire school education.

A family friend we called Aunt Jane was my favorite teacher outside of school, who was a major influence in my life from childhood through 9th grade (when she taught biology to my two best friends and I during a home-school year). Leading us on muddy walks through woods and swamps, she would explain amazing things about the plants, trees, amphibians, and bugs. I had previously thought of the woods as an empty stage waiting for something exciting to happen (like a bear), but Aunt Jane made even the most apparently empty woods magical.

Chess or video games?

Chess, particularly the knights.

What do you do for relaxation?

I run. Or cross-country-ski if I’m near snow.

Douglas Adams or Scott Adams?

Scott Adams, but I think he’s started phoning them in. The old ones he could do that magic trick of making me laugh three times en route to the punchline. On the other hand, I’ve discovered The Office, which I think has successfully captured some of the same kind of humor.

What was your favorite book as a kid?

It was probably a four-way tie between Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, and two books written by my relatives–My Friend Flicka, and George and His Horse Bill. One of my greatest birthday disappointments was the day my Aunt Louisa, who is an artist, gave me a book called Little Horses, with a beautiful homemade book-jacket she had drawn of running horses. Underneath was Little Women–her attempt to interest me in the most famous Louisa (eventually she was successful, but only years later).

Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, and Tintin, despite their deplorable dearth of equine characters, were very high on my list as well.

What new technology do you think may actually have the potential for making people’s lives better?

I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about a technology that was developed by a friend and for which my father is trying to raise money, but it would be my choice even if I didn’t know anyone involved. Seldon Technologies has made a tiny, incredibly efficient water-filtration system using carbon nanotubes which filter out not only the normal grime and bacteria but also viruses.

Obviously technology alone can’t solve the problem of access to clean water for everyone, but this seems to me to be a huge step forward.

If you could be reincarnated for one day to live the life of any scientist or writer, who would you choose and why?

Definitely not a writer. Reading is much more gratifying than writing.

But it would be such a wonderful gift to be reincarnated as some young scientist who got to be part of the rise of quantum mechanics in the twenties and thirties–at the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge under Rutherford, or at Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen. To be just a small piece in either of those tremendous intellectual atmospheres, where terrific people were making the most beautiful, wonderful discoveries–I would really, really love that.

What was your best subject in high school? Your worst?

My best subject was something we had called Humanities, which was taught by Mr. Hurley, who–like Mrs. Lotz–was one of those great teachers who cuts across the normal divisions of students to get the whole class interested in whatever arcane subject he’s teaching. We somehow covered (among other subjects) the Peloponnesian Wars, Apocalypse Now, and Faulkner, and I loved the interconnected mix of history, literature, and movies.

My worst subject was Spanish. I had this master plan to catch up with the upper-level Spanish at my high school so I could be in the same class as the boy I had a crush on. So I studied it over the summer, and somehow I did get into the class, but I never really loved it or was good at it, and–sadly–I didn’t make sure that it stuck with me, because it would have been really useful subsequently, since I’ve spent five of the last eight years living in California.