Quantum Entanglement

MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

By: Jed Brody

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jed Brody equips listeners to decide for themselves. He explains how our commonsense assumptions impose constraints-from which entangled particles break free.

Brody explores such concepts as local realism, Bell's inequality, polarization, time dilation, and special relativity. He introduces listeners to imaginary physicists Alice and Bob and their photon analyses; points out that it's easier to reject falsehood than establish the truth; and reports that some physicists explain entanglement by arguing that we live in a cross-section of a higher-dimensional reality. He also examines a variety of viewpoints held by physicists, including quantum decoherence, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, genuine fortuitousness, and QBism.

©2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2020 Gildan Media

Lost.

Boring, boring, boring. Not at all written in an interesting way and I was lost the entire time. I've listened to many books on quantum physics and usually enjoy it, but I guess this just wasn't for me.

Not suitable for aural presentation

The section on Alice and Bob is unintelligible. Perhaps the printed version would be understandable

gappy and devoid of rigor

The approach taken in this book (reading functions, formulas, scenarios, and their variations) utterly fails in audio book setting. Worse, even in text format, the analysis is weak, gappy, and incomplete, relying on loose and wholly inaccurate language to make conclusory assertions instead of making any rigorous efforts to persuade on substantive merits. Finally, the core effort of the book to explain and analyze the tension between local realism and certain experimental results is surprisingly shallow and, simply put, falls flat. I was very disappointed.

Impossible to follow

There were entire chapters where the most common phrases were things like “Switch one results in red for photon a and green for photon b, which is given a score of one. Switch two results in…” And that would go on for four to six sets, and then later text would refer to what color resulted from photons in the experiment and what color resulted and what score it got and…

And I don’t think even a pdf, which isn’t even part of this anyway, could have saved this book.

A bummer as it made lofty promises at the beginning that it was going to make it easy to understand quantum entanglement without complex math so anyone could understand.

I listened as part as audible plus, so no money lost. Don’t waste a credit otherwise. Unless you like listening to several chapters of incomprehensible streams of sets and colors and numbers over and over and over again. I’m not sure even a physicist could follow this.

Not Audible Material

The only thing harder to understand than spooky action at a distance is this book in audio format! Assume that when you are reading datasets, it is not going to be a good Audible title. Glad I did not use a credits for this.