Beyond Weird

Written by Philip Ball

Narrated by Jonathan Cowley

"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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781541477193

Philip Ball

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, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London.

Reviews for Beyond Weird

[Michael DiTomasso · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting book. I will probably listen to it again one day. It stretches your conceptions and deepens your understanding. Nobody completely understands quantum mechanics at a conceptual level, but the reader will be closer to that understanding after finishing the book. (And maybe closer still after a second run at it!)

[Lyndon Turner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

His focus on explaining the competing theories along with their strengths and weaknesses really helped me grasp the essence of quantum theory.

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A refreshing new angle for me. Great that it took us through to current thinking and was about the ideas and not the personalities. Learned a lot about superposition, entanglement and decoherence - at least in flashes - way beyond my understanding in most ways but a very satisfying and interesting read. I definitely want more of these up to date books as the subject evolves.

[nmarun-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not a physicist by any means, but I've read about Quantum Physics earlier. However, this book explains the arcane concepts of duality, superposition and entanglement in much simpler language. If you are into gathering information about quantum, this is a great book to start with. There aren't many equations, though I would've been okay with a few more of those in the book.Some deeply-thought provoking statements in the book:"Quantum objects are not sometimes particles and sometimes waves. Quantum objects are what they are, and we have no reason to suppose that ‘what they are’ changes in any meaningful way depending on how we try to look at them.""Everything that seems strange about quantum mechanics comes down to measurement.""What is more fundamental – a fact established by logic or one established by observation?"Is measurement the limit of our understanding of the macro-world? I'm guessing I'm constrained by my senses of what this world is and how it works. Had my senses been different or even just more sensitive, I probably would've seen a very different world.After reading this book, I'm in state of both understanding and not understanding Quantum Physics at the same time. But if someone "measures" my knowledge about this, decoherence hits and I'll realize I don't know much about it!

[antao-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The main thing you need to know about entanglement is this: it tells us that a quantum object may have properties that are not entirely located on that object.”In “Beyond Weird” by Philip Ball“What, though, if the photon polarizations were already determined from the outset by hidden variables, only to become manifest when the measurements were made? Then there’s no problem: we’re back with the gloves. The trouble is that there are no hidden variables in quantum mechanics that ‘secretly’ assign definite values to variables even though they appear to acquire them randomly through the act of measurement.”In “Beyond Weird” by Philip Ball“It seems that measurement somehow does destroy quantum coherence, forcing us to speak of the wavefunction as having ‘collapsed’.”In “Beyond Weird” by Philip Ball“Decoherence is what destroys the possibility of observing macroscopic superpositions - including Schrödinger’s live/dead cat. And this has nothing to do with observation in the normal sense: we don’t need a conscious mind to ‘look’ in order to ‘collapse the wavefunction’. All we need is for the environment to disperse the quantum coherence. This happens with extraordinary efficiency - it’s probably the most efficient process known to science. And it is very clear why size matters here: there is simply more interaction with the environment, and therefore faster decoherence, for larger objects.”In “Beyond Weird” by Philip BallIf I look up the various interpretations in the wiki list of quantum interpretations, I’ve got two choices; One, I pick my super favourite interpretation, but be clear about what it explains trivially and what it leaves as crazy magic. Or two, I realize that without actual science to distinguish them, these are all just idle thoughts to ponder while I shut up and calculate. I mean, hell, we don’t even know that the one true interpretation has even been dreamed up and articulated yet.Ball tries to debunk some of the stuff regarding the usual stuff dealing with the Measurement Problem by stating that MWI replaces the usual confusion and mysticism about Copenhagen "observers" with confusion and mysticism about consciousness and bizarre claims that somehow being the leaf node in a tree of branching quantum events means I cannot trace back to my local root node. Which, from a computer science and math point is super silly. As silly as the dumb observer claims one usually hears when people misinterpret Copenhagen to mean that human observers cause the universe to exist or similar nonsense. The more I think about MWI, the more I feel it doesn't explain anything. Or, really, say anything at all besides the grandiose "whatever can happen, does happen". It's a metaphysical vision that appeals to many scientifically minded people, because it seems on the surface to restore some sort of physical realism. But that's all it is; it's as fantastic, unverifiable and personal as any religion. There is no there there.My main difficulty with MWI is that decoherence, as well as being "fuzzy", is not enough for irreversible branching - theoretically, it can always be undone, so combining two branches together. MWI is on the table along with other interpretations, but the only truth we will ever have is the mathematical models that science establishes for us. There will always be multiple valid interpretations of the same equations, and it might be that nature doesn't have a preference! There may be no "real" interpretation that exists. Nevertheless, as humans we are free to choose an interpretation we find palatable, but there may be no "truth" to our interpretations even if they seem reasonable and coherent to our human brains. The MWI, like most interpretations of QM, assumes that superposition actually exists physically, rather than merely as a computational model for enabling accurate computations. But as I have pointed out previously in other posts, by simply changing the order of the computations involved in computing quantum probabilities, the entire concept of a superposition can be made to vanish - all that is left is a mathematically identical description of an energy-detecting filter-bank, which, when presented with equi-quanta inputs in each channel, reduces the entire quantum mechanical formulation, to the description of a simple histogram. That is the origin of the Born rule. There is no superposition at all in this simple reformulation of the math - just a mathematical identity, that is not physically identical to anything remotely resembling a superposition. In short, the superposition does not vanish or collapse, because it never existed in the first place, except as an unnecessary, figment of the imagination, like the "god of the gaps"; useful for performing computations, but unnecessary to explain the probabilistic nature of QM, which is the only thing the MWI was contrived to explain.Bottom-line: The concept of a superposition is sufficient, but ultimately unnecessary, to explain why quantum theory works, as an accurate, probabilistic description of reality. Since the MWI falsely assumes superposition is necessary, it itself is rendered unnecessary. Ball does a great job at attempting to explain THE CRAZY WORLD OF QM.

[jefware · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Asking the universe at finer and finer scales we'll yield ifness not isness; probability instead of being.