Review

I read a lot of these popular science books and usually learn something from them. This was no exception. The big takeaway from this book is that at the scale where quantum mechanics applies, the universe is really weird. It doesn’t correspond in any meaningful way with our experience or our intuition. It’s all well and good to say that elementary particles act like particles and also act like waves, but the way in which they do so just isn’t really something you can wrap your mind around. This book really hammered on that point, effectively and interestingly.

The main body of the book has absolutely no equations, unfortunately. But there is a good appendix on spin, which helps fill in some of the gaps. I can only wish that ‘poets’ would take the time to learn a little calculus and group theory so that books like this could delve at least a little more deeply into the math that underlies the theory.

Metadata