Beyond Weird – Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different - Softcover

Ball, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022675510X ISBN 13: 9780226755106

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Ball is a writer, author, and broadcaster, and was formerly an editor at Nature. His writing on scientific subjects has appeared in places ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Invisible, Curiosity, and, most recently, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022675510X
• ISBN 13: 9780226755106
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384