The Age of Entanglement

Zusatztext Captivating. . . . A movingly human and surprisingly accessible picture of the unveiling of the quantum universe. . . . Admirably lucid. Chicago Tribune A sparkling! original book. . . . Gilder brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities handled with a verve reminiscent of Jeremy Berstein's scientific portraits in The New Yorker. . . . What had been for generations a story of theoretical malcontents now intrigues spooks and start-ups. All this radiates from Louisa Gilder's story. Quantum physics lives. The New York Times Book Review Highly entertaining. . . . Hard to put down. . . . Grippingly readable. . . . Gilder is a fine storyteller who brings to life one of the great scientific adventures of our time. American Scientist [A] fascinating yarn. . . . For anyone who wants to understand the human angle of modern physics and separate quirks from quarks! this is your book. The Providence Journal (A Best Book of 2008) A witty! charming! and accurate account of the history of that bugaboo of physicsquantum entanglement . . . There are many books out there on the history or foundations of quantum mechanics. Some are more technical! others more historical! but none take the unique approach that Gilder hasto focus on the quantum weirdness of entanglement itself as her book's unifying them and to present it in an inviting and accessible way . . . Delightful. Science Astonishing. . . . The courage and even audacity of a nonscientist to investigate the evolution of ideas about the most esoteric aspects of quantum physics are truly remarkable. . . . Gilder is a phenomenal writer. Charleston Post & Courier A welcome addition to the genre. . . . [Gilder's] book really shines . . . [She] proves that the neglected last fifty years of quantum mechanics is . . . full of brilliant! quirky personalities and mind-bending discoveries. . . . She is a very compelling writer! and she clearly understands what makes science exciting and science history interesting. ScientificBlogging.com The clearest and most intriguing history of the manner in which the scientific method continues to advance knowledge. An amazing story. Sacramento News & Review A delightfully unconventional history. . . . Especially enjoyable are the portraits of the less famous physicists . . . Gilder has done her homework. Nature [Gilder] displays an ability to capture a personality in a few words. The Washington Post An admirable! unexpected book! historically sound and seamlessly constructed! that transports those of us who do not understand quantum mechanics into the lives and thoughts of those who did. George Dyson! author of Darwin Among the Machines Louisa Gilder disentangles the story of entanglement with such narrative panache! such poetic verve and such metaphorical precision that for a moment I almost thought I understood quantum mechanics. Matt Ridley! author of Genome Informationen zum Autor Louisa Gilder was born in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2000. This is her first book. Klappentext In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected-a phenomenon which he derisively described as "spooky action at a distance. In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation "entanglement. Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist John Bell demonstrated just how strange this entanglement really was. Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century's greatest physicists, Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing ...

Auteur
Louisa Gilder was born in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2000. This is her first book.

Texte du rabat

In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected-a phenomenon which he derisively described as "spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation "entanglement.” Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist John Bell demonstrated just how strange this entanglement really was. Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century's greatest physicists, Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing the scientists' own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. The result is a richly illuminating exploration of one of the most exciting concepts of quantum physics.

Résumé
In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder brings to life one of the pivotal debates in twentieth century physics. In 1935, Albert Einstein famously showed that, according to the quantum theory, separated particles could act as if intimately connected–a phenomenon which he derisively described as “spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation “entanglement.” Yet its existence was mostly ignored until 1964, when the Irish physicist John Bell demonstrated just how strange this entanglement really was. Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing the scientists’ own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. The result is a richly illuminating exploration of one of the most exciting concepts of quantum physics.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1

The Socks

1978 and 1981

In 1978, when John Bell first met Reinhold Bertlmann, at the weekly tea party at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, near Geneva, he could not know that the thin young Austrian, smiling at him through a short black beard, was wearing mismatched socks. And Bertlmann did not notice the characteristically logical extension of Bell’s vegetarianism—plastic shoes.

Deep under the ground beneath these two pairs of maverick feet, ever-increasing magnetic fields were accelerating protons (pieces of the tiny center of the atom) around and around a doughnut-shaped track a quarter of a kilometer in diameter. Studying these particles was part of the daily work of CERN, as the organization was called (a tangled history left the acronym no longer correlated with the name). In the early 1950s, at the age of twenty-five, Bell had acted as consultant to the team that designed this subterranean accelerator, christened in scientific pseudo-Greek “the Proton Synchrotron.” In 1960, the Irish physicist returned to Switzerland to live, with his Scottish wife, Mary, also a physicist and a designer of accelorators. CERN’s charmless, colorless campus of box-shaped buildings with protons flying through their foundations became Bell’s intellectual home for the rest of his life, in the green pastureland between Geneva and the mountains. At such a huge and impersonal place, Bell believed, newcomers should be welcomed. He had never seen Bertlmann before, and so he walked up to him and said, his brogue still clear despite almost two decades in Geneva: “I’m John Bell.”

This was a familiar name to Bertlmann—familiar, in fact, to almost anyone who studied the high-speed crashes and collisions taking place under Bell’s and Bertlmann’s feet (in other words, the disciplines known as particle physics and quantum field theory). Bell had spent the last quarter of a century conducting piercing investigations into these flying, decaying, and shattering particles. Like Sherlock Holmes, he focused on details others ignored and was wont to make startli…