Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries

Revealing recent developments in quantum theory that are radically transforming our reality, a scientist demystifies quantum physics and explains the fundamental riddle of quantum mechanics--why a single photon can be seen going in two directions at once. 30,000 first printing.

Astrophysicist Gribbin takes readers on an exciting, lucid and mind-stretching tour of the puzzles and paradoxes of quantum physics. Since the publication of his 1984 bestseller In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, experiments have confirmed some of the bizarre phenomena of the subatomic world?a single atom that goes two ways at once and interferes with itself; pairs of particles linked across space and instantaneously "communicating" with one another; photons (particles of light) for which time stands still. Gribbin reviews IBM physicist Charles Bennett's 1993 proposal that quantum theory supports teleportation of objects through space and Oxford physicist David Deutsch's recent outline of an experiment designed to tell us whether multiple universes exist. He endorses a "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics based on the notion that quantum waves can travel backwards through time. A gifted popularizer, Gribbin uses thought-experiments and diagrams to make difficult ideas accessible without oversimplifying.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (LJ 7/84), veteran science writer Gribbin considered a famous paradox in quantum mechanics: that subatomic particles are not really particles until someone observes them. His new book explains recent experimental and theoretical findings about the strange nature of the submicroscopic world of the atom. The "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics offered by Niels Bohr and his colleagues has prevailed for almost 70 years, but there is now a plethora of competing interpretations. Gribbin reviews this active and controversial field and cautiously indicates his personal preference for one of the new theoretical models. It is fascinating to see how a problem long regarded as "settled" has acquired new layers of mystery. For larger science collections?Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gribbin earned physics-writing eminence with In Search of Schrx9a dinger's Cat (1984), a popular must-have for libraries that describes the quantum universe of felines and all other matter. In this sequel, he addresses certain dents inflicted by current researchers on the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of the behavior of electrons and photons that is associated with Bohr, Heisenberg, and others, physicists who capped the quantum theory with wave-particle duality, uncertainty, and nonlocality. The denters are experimenters who have, for example, disproven some "established" facts, such as the axiom that a quantum energy packet may be a wave or particle but not both. It can be both, apparently. Feynman's seminal contributions, particularly his sum-over-histories explanation for the apparition of light traveling in a single line, have also been further refined. As usual in his intriguing books, Gribbin speculates on sf-style implications, among them using quanta as an unbreakable code or for a teletransporter a{ } la Star Trek. In the true quantum realm, Gribbin remains the premier expositor of the latest developments. Gilbert Taylor