Quantum Physics Books
Gregory Monty
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Vlatko Vedral is Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the Universities of Oxford and Singapore. He has published over 100 research papers in quantum mechanics and quantum information and was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007. He has held a Professorship at Leeds, visiting professorships in Vienna and Singapore (NUS) and at Perimeter Institute in Canada. He is the author of Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.
A few times last week at the Schrdinger Sessions workshop, I made reference to books that I think do a good job with particular aspects of quantum physics (in addition to the one that I wrote, that is...). At the end of the workshop, some of the writers asked if I had a list of those. A couple of them made the list of recommended science books for non-scientists that I posted here back in April, but I don't seem to have a quantum-specific list. So let's fix that...
What follows is a selection of popular-audience books on quantum physics that I think are particularly good in one way or another. This is not an exhaustive list, by any means, just a personal selection from the subset of pop-quantum books that I happen to have read. I'll group these loosely by the general approach they take.
One common approach to explaining quantum physics is to approach it through the history of the subject, and the many colorful personalities involved. Uncertainty by David Lindley is an excellent compact example of this, focusing on the origin of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the many debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr over the philosophical foundations of quantum theory. It covers a bit more of the "Old Quantum Theory" period (between the Bohr model of hydrogen in 1913 and full QM in 1927) than usual, and does a good job showing how Bohr and Einstein were often talking past each other.
Louisa Gilder's The Age of Entanglement covers some of the same territory in a bit more detail, and stretches forward into the 1970's and the first experimental tests of entanglement. Gilder builds her book around "conversations" between key figures with the dialogue drawn from their letters and other writings, which works very well.
The Second Creation by Charles Mann and Robert Crease is a more scholarly/journalistic approach to the development of quantum physics, based on extensive interviews with the surviving quantum pioneers and their associates. I also like this book a lot because it emphasizes the key role of experiments, including things like cosmic ray observations that are often left out of modern presentations.
Frank Close's The Infinity Puzzle is a history of the development of the Standard Model, including the development of QED, the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces and what's now called the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to particles. This book was particularly interesting in that it details the many false steps and missed opportunities along the way, so it's great for getting the process of science as well as the core physics.
How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser is, as the title promises, a highly readable look at the role counterculture and "New Age" thinking played in sparking the renewed interest in quantum foundations that started in the 1980's and has exploded into the modern field of quantum information. While none of their colorful attempts to explain ESP through quantum phenomena actually pan out, showing why they can't work proved surprisingly fruitful.
The other big category of pop-quantum books that I like are those that explain how known physics works. In this vein, I'm very fond of Robert Oerter's The Theory of Almost Everything, a compact survey of the Standard Model of particle physics, the collection of particles and forces that make up everything we know about physics. This is an enormously successful theory, often skipped lightly over on the way to more speculative and exotic topics, and Oerter's book does a nice job of putting it front and center.
Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger is an excellent treatment of the physics of entanglement in the context of quantum optics. Zeilinger is a major figure in this field-- his name regularly comes up when people try to guess the next Nobel prize in physics-- and this is an excellent treatment. I particularly like the way it walks the reader through looking at "real" data, to see how the spooky correlations of entanglement emerge from measurements of polarized photons.
And it would be irresponsible to mention any book by a major figure without also citing Richard Feynman's QED, based on a series of lectures he gave in the early 1980's. This is one of the best explanations you'll find of the ideas behind quantum electrodynamics, written by one of its founders. Feynman's reputation is outsized enough to generate occasional backlash, but he genuinely was a brilliant dude and an exceptional communicator, and this book shows both of those.
Finally, if you don't mind some math with your explanations, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman gets into the details of quantum physics from the information side of things, rather than wave-particle duality. It's based on a course Susskind has taught for many years, and has a lot of equations in it, but it's very smoothly presented, and the particular approach they use gets at some deep ideas with minimal pain.
And as long as I'm mentioning something on the textbook-y side, I once used The Quantum Challenge by George Greenstein and Arthur Zajonc for a class on quantum optics. This makes use of a good deal of math, including more explicit calculus than the Susskind and Friedman, but is an excellent overview of great experiments in the field of quantum optics testing the reality of all those weird predictions about photons and entanglement.
Finally, a couple of books that are more speculative, starting with Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. One of the less beneficial things to come out of the quantum revolution was the idea that quantum measurement requires a "conscious observer" in some way. This idea is so vague as to be unworkable and has mostly dropped out of real physics, but was picked up by a lot of, well, the sort of quasi-hippies in Kaiser's book above. This has led to a lot of really crazy stuff being written about the role of consciousness in quantum physics and vice versa; this book is one of the few non-crazy takes on the subject that I've seen.
And, finally, I'll close this list with Amanda Gefter's Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn, a whirlwind survey of more speculative topics-- getting well beyond "normal" low-energy quantum physics to talk about black holes and that sort of thing-- wrapped up in a personal narrative. This gets into some heavy ideas, but Gefter's voice and enthusiasm for the topic are charming enough to carry it off.
So, that's a quick list of a dozen books that I think do a good job of making the central ideas of quantum physics accessible to a broader audience (well, reasonably so-- a couple are not for the math-phobic...). Again, this is my personal take, and not an exhaustive list; there are a whole lot of books out there on the subject, and I haven't come close to reading all of them. Feel free to recommend others in the comments.
There have been similar questions on mathoverflow, but the answers always gave some advanced introduction to the mathematics of quantum field theory, or string theory and so forth. While those may be good introduction to the mathematics of those subjects, what I require is different: what provides a soft and readable introduction to the (many) concepts and theories out there, such that the mathematics involved in it is in comfortable generality. What makes this is a "for mathematicians" question, is that a standard soft introduction will also assume that the reader is uncomfortable with the word "manifold" or certainly "sheaf" and "Lie algebra". So I'm looking for the benefit of scope and narrative, together with a presumption of mathematical maturity.
Math Answer: It is the class of cohomology of the action of the group of Galilee, measuring the lack of equivariance of the moment map, on a symplectic manifold representing the isolated dynamical system.
These answers are the mathematical versions of physics classical constructions, but it would be very difficult to appreciate them if you have no pedestrian introduction of physics. You may enjoy also Aristotles' book "Physics", as a first dish, just for tasting the flavor of physics :)
Just before entering in the modern world of physics I would suggest few basic lectures for the winter evenings, near the fireplace (I'm sorry I write them down in french because I read them in french).
" I want to explore the working of elementary physics ... which I have always found so hard to fathom.[...]I have written this work in order to learn the subject myself, in a form that I find comprehensible.[...]By physics I mean ... well, physics, what physicists mean by physics, i.e., the actual study of physical objects ... (rather than the study of symplectic structures on cotangent bundles, for example)."
It tries to touch almost all areas in physics, including the hot ones. Penrose emphasizes the mathematical part (especially the geometric interpretations), and avoids to be superficial (many scientific writers, when trying to make the things easier, use misleading metaphors). One warning is to be careful that sometimes he expresses his personal viewpoint, which is not always mainstream. But it is clear when he does this, and he is very careful to make justice to the mainstream viewpoint, by presenting it very well.
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