How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog

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I've never read a popular physics book that didn't just skip over that part, and it made some of the concepts a lot easier to understand. Orzel establishes a good foundation for the reader by developing the key ideas and establishing a basic vocabulary. But of course, while these words may help me to visualise what a state vector is a bit better, they may confuse others even more. I am aware that in my own review, I have done the same, and introduced the metaphors of 'fog' and 'schizophrenic' to capture the behaviour of particles. Before we try to measure the position, there is a chance that we will find the particle here, there, and everywhere.

I feel that quantum physics, just as relativity theory, cannot be understood at a satisfactory intellectual level by reference to concepts we know.I am expressing thoughts that were triggered through my reading of his book, and I find these thoughts fascinating. At a length of just a couple of hundred pages, the book doesn’t cover all quantum ideas, but it also doesn’t bury the reader under a mountain of scientific jargon and data. Maybe a dog person would find Chad Orzel’s attempts to talk quantum mechanics in the language of a pet and her owner more endearing. I found this device far too distracting and cheesy for my tastes, and it adds very little to Orzel’s explanations.

We would be able to recognise the limitations of language, and in so doing re-define somewhat the idea that we and 'reality' are somehow disparate entities. This book tries with best intentions, simplest explanations and concrete examples to explain the this mind-boggling branch of modern physics under the comfy blanket of conversations with a dog. If you’re really into quantum mechanics and learn about it but you have little or no knowledge of the concept, you will definitely enjoy this but you have to prepare yourself for some hard and heavy-duty reading, it took me almost two months to complete this little compact book.

The thing I really liked about this book is that Orzel actually goes into detail about how the experiments were designed that proved various aspects of quantum theory. They aren't correct in my e-book edition, and they probably wouldn't have been correct in every DTB edition—or if they are (which means they must have been corrected for every other edition) why aren't they corrected for the e-book? He studied at University of Maryland, College Park, MD: PhD in Chemical Physics, 1999 and Williams College, Williamstown, MA: BA in Physics, 1993. The state vector can be formulated as a direct consequence of the superposition state of the 'particles' that give rise to the quantum field.

We'll see how they compare - and whether repetition and a different way of presenting the weirdness continue to nudge me along a wee bit in my attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible. What happens to the ultra-fundamental human concept of countability when we deal with entangled states? As Orzel points out in the second chapter, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is well known even in popular culture—but it is also often misinterpreted as a statement about measurement rather than a statement about reality. He includes lots of helpful diagrams and explains what each different kind of experiment can and can't prove, how and why.In between, it explains Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the quantum Zeno effect, and even quantum teleportation. I was a bit disappointed in what I thought was short shrift given to the Many Worlds interpretation, but I guess his point was essentially that it could be entirely right but we can't ever know, because all those other worlds are lost to us. Turns out we are running into very similar linguistic problems when we adopt the expression 'field' in the hope this would solve the issues. I like to look over the new fiction and nonfiction sections, as well as just wandering the stacks pulling down and scanning all kinds of books.