The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone

by Kenneth W. Ford, Diane Goldstein (Contributor)

As Kenneth W. Ford shows us in The Quantum World, the laws governing the very small and the very swift defy common sense and stretch our minds to the limit. Drawing on a deep familiarity with the discoveries of the twentieth century, Ford gives an appealing account of quantum physics that will help the serious reader make sense of a science that, for all its successes, remains mysterious. In order to make the book even more suitable for classroom use, the author, assisted by Diane Goldstein, has included a new section of Quantum Questions at the back of the book. A separate answer manual to these 300+ questions is available; visit The Quantum World website for ordering information.



There is also a cloth edition of this book, which does not include the Quantum Questions included in this paperback edition.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction, Quantum Mechanics

330 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 2004

Reviews

[pegah · Rating 3 out of 5]

یک کتاب خوب با یه ترجمه واقعا بد! در واقع این کتاب احتمالا یه ترجمه دانشجویی بوده. یک نمونه از پرت بودن مترجم اینکه نویسنده یه جا راجع به موج و ذره و ماهیت اونها صحبت میکنه و مثال پخش شدن صدای ارگ در کلیسا رو میزنه که من حدس میزنم از کلمه


Cathedral

استفاده میکنه و مترجم محترم نوشته

"مثل پخش شدن صدای ارگ در مسجد جامع"!!

دیگه من نمیدونم منظورش مسجد جامع اصفهان بوده یا جای دیگه :)

[Col Cavanaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ended up being a pretty fun read! I learned a lot and, for the most part, enjoyed myself in the process.

The first half was a little trying. Imagine being toted around someone else’s family reunion, maybe by a well-intentioned but somewhat /bland/ friend. You’re being introduced to aunts, uncles, the grandparents, maybe a niece or nephew, a few ‘honorary’ family members… “Have you met my cousin Rebecca? She hates crowds and but loves hockey, and she’s super close with my other cousin Ruth even though they’re actually total opposites...” And on and on it goes. So many random details and dangerously few reasons to care — besides, of course, the fact that you volunteered to come to this god-forsaken event in the first place.

*Finallllly* there’s nobody left to meet.. You realize, “I’ve already forgotten everyone’s names.” Still, you breathe a quiet sigh of relief and make a rather conspicuous dash for the bar…

Suddenly, like an angel descending from heaven above, your friend’s delightful mother greets you with a tall glass of red wine and some steamy gossip about all the randos you just met. Names and faces get matched with juicy backstories full of mystery and intrigue ~~ Welcome to the second half of the book! We love it here.

I actually did enjoy the first half of the book well enough, but if you’re not either very patient or very nerdy, best of luck to you. All that said: I knew virtually nothing about quantum physics going in, and this was a great introduction! Definitely recommend to anyone interested.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brings the reader closer to QM than anything I've ever read

This is the best book on quantum physics that I've ever read. What Kenneth Ford, retired director of the American Institute for Physics, set out to do (and I think largely accomplishes) is to make the world of the quantum (somewhat!) accessible to the general reader. Using a minimum of mathematics and a maximum of analogy and explanation expressed in a direct and readable style, Ford brings the "eerie theory" (p. 247) as close to the everyday mind as might be possible. Part of the reason for the book's success is that Ford had high school seniors at Germantown Academy carve "up the book among themselves and" provide "valuable (and unvarnished) feedback."

But let's face it, even great physicists, entirely enmeshed in the difficult mathematics of QM--people who have devoted their lives to understanding the quantum world--can't answer John Wheeler's famous question: "How come the quantum?" The problem is not so much that the quantum world is complicated or that the math is difficult. The problem is that the "reality" of QM is fundamentally at odds with our everyday experience.

Some of the ideas such as superposition, entanglement, fundamental probability, exclusion, and the famous uncertainty principle discovered by Werner Heisenberg, to mention just a few, are completely alien to our experience as human beings. In this regard I am reminded of the saying from Eastern religion that the world is not as we think it is. The world we see is a representation constructed by our minds in collaboration with our senses, honed through the ages by the evolutionary experience so that what we see and hear and feel and taste and smell and especially "understand" is conditioned by our need to survive. We do not see x-rays or radio waves or individual atoms, nor do we know intuitively that atoms are mostly empty space, nor do we appreciate that the colors we see are really just inside our heads, our way of apprehending the differing wave lengths of light coming from the objects in the world, not something intrinsic to those objects.

Et cetera, one might say. So vast is the world and so tiny can things be (but not tinier than the Planck limit!--or so it is postulated) and so remote from our day-to-day needs that until recent times the extremes had no relevance for us. But everything has changed. Lasers, computers, nuclear reactors (and bombs) stem from knowledge of things impossible to see and even impossible to visualize or to fully appreciate. The technology works, the math rings true, and our world is changed for the better, for the worse, but regardless, changed forever.

But how much can the average educated person with no mathematic training learn about QM? Is it a hopeless case? Certainly the complexities presented in this book just in terms of the number of particles and their properties are formidable. I would have to take notes and construct charts and review and re-review in order to keep the particles straight in my mind. (Ford provides a particle appendix with four tables that helps.) But even so, I would not understand quantum mechanics. However I think there is something wonderful in what I do learn and appreciate. Namely, that the world really is not as we think it is. Such knowledge ushers in feelings of humility and awe and leads to a greater appreciation of how amazing everything is.

Implicit in Ford's presentation is the idea that quantum mechanics is not complete. He writes, "Many physicists believe that some reason for quantum mechanics awaits discovery." (p. 99) The implication is that something more fundamental underpins QM, and when that is discovered our understanding will be perhaps complete, or (more likely, I suspect) a whole new world of mystery will be opened to us. The fact that relativity and QM are yet to be completely reconciled, and that gravity does not fit into the equations of QM, fairly cries out for a larger theory.

Most important for me and I think for most people interested in QM are its philosophic and even religious implications. Facile ideas of gods that talk to humans only through the words of ancient books, or of gods that cannot do their will in the world except through the work (sometimes malicious) of humans, or gods that communicate with no inkling of anything beyond the Age of Bronze, dissipate like fairy tales when one contemplates the world of the very large and the very small. In particular, when I think about the idea that the entire universe was once (before the Big Bang) stuffed into a mathematical point, I am led to wonder what could be contained within the relatively vast expanse of a particle as defined in QM. Who is to say there cannot be worlds within worlds within worlds?

Anyway, I believe that even a cursory or hurried reading of this book will prove valuable to the interested reader, and for those with the time and energy to study Ford's presentation, a lot more can be gained even for the non-mathematical.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Geert-Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an accessible book to whatever extent quantum physics is accessible. It captures most quantum physics phenomena. The biggest drawback is the time spent on explaining the family of subatomic particles. It is an enormous job to tell them apart and serve no purpose in the book but the appearance in numerous examples of particle reactions most readers won't help understand the topic.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Similar concepts and stories to his other book 101 Quantum Questions with some different info, photos, and stories included. I enjoyed his easy style of explanations and the illustrations and tables included, as well as his anecdotes. Our existence is such a miracle. This crazy gift and experience of life fills me with gratitude to be able to be here and a part of it all.

"The year 1926 was right in the middle of a golden age of physics. In a brief few years, 1924 to 1928, physicists came up with some of the most important--and startling--ideas that science has ever known. . . the insight that a single electron or photon can be moving in two or more different ways at the same time (as if you could be driving due north and due west simultaneously, or window shopping in New York and Boston simultaneously). . ." pg. 3

"The longest known time is the 'lifetime of the universe'--that is, the apparent duration of the expansion of the universe, currently estimated to be 13.7 billion years, or early 10 to the 18th s." pg. 16

"So, roughly speaking, we have three layers of complexity [in the physical world]. There is, in the top layer--the visible layer--great complexity (rippling water, trembling leaves, the weather). Underlying this complexity is a layer of startling simplicity uncovered by scientists over the past few centuries (Newton's gravity, Maxwell's electromagnetism, Dirac's quantum electron). In the deepest layer, complexity rears its head again. Tiny deviations from simplicity appear. But these are not like the complexities of our immediate environment. They reflect what may be a still deeper, subtler simplicity." pg. 59

"Fortunately for the structure of the universe and for us humans, the lightest baryon has nowhere to go. It is stable, because there is no lighter baryon into which it can decay. That lightest baryon is the proton. It seems to live forever. Nearest neighbor to the proton is the neutron, just a bit heavier. This means that the neutron is unstable: it can decay into the lower-mass proton (and an electron and antineutrino) without violating the law of baryon conservation or the law of energy conservation. Left alone, the neuron lives, on average, a whole fifteen minutes before it vanishes in a puff of three other particles. Fortunately again for us humans, the neutron is stabilized within atomic nuclei, so certain combinations of up to 209 protons and neutrons can bundle together and live forever. This means that our world is made of scores of different elements, not just the single element hydrogen. And it's all because mass is energy and energy is mass." pg. 69-70

"Among the massless particles is the still hypothetical graviton, the force carrier of gravity." pg. 73

"Indeed, you literally 'see' photons nearly every waking moment, day and night. They carry part of the Sun's energy to Earth, and bring the light emitted by every star, planet, candle, light bulb, and lightning flash to your eyes. Billions of photons each second carry information from the page you are reading. And there are lots of photons that you don't see--those that carry radio and television and wireless-phone signals, heat from warm walls, and X rays through your body. The universe is filled with low-energy photons, the so-called cosmic background radiation, left over from the Big Bang. All in all, there are about a billion photons in the universe for every material particle." pg. 76

"Here is the stunning generality that physicists now believe to be true. Every interaction in the world results ultimately from the emission and absorption of bosons (the force carriers) by leptons and quarks at spacetime points. Three-prong vertices lie at the heart of every interaction." pg. 86

"The 'big four' conserved quantities of the large-scale world--energy, momentum, angular momentum, and charge--are also conserved in the subatomic world. This is no surprise, for everything in the large-scale world is built ultimately of subatomic units. So you can think of the causal link going from small to large: energy, momentum, angular momentum, and charge are conserved in the large-scale world because they are conserved in the subatomic world. The conservation laws that govern these quantities are regarded as absolute. An absolute conservation law is one for which no confirmed violation has ever been seen and which is believed to be valid under all circumstances. Moreover, we have theoretical reason to believe that these four laws are absolute. Relativity and quantum theory join to predict that these laws should be valid. But experiment is the final arbiter. No amount of beautiful theory trumps experiment. Calling these conservation laws absolute must be as tentative as every other firm pronouncement about nature." pg. 159-160

"There is a rule here: the stronger the interaction, the more numerous the constraints. The strong interaction is hemmed in by the most conservation laws and the most invariance principles; the electromagnetic interaction, by slightly fewer; and the weak interaction, by still fewer. Is gravity, the weakest of all interactions, an even more flagrant violator of conservation laws and invariance principles? That's a wonderfully interesting question to which we do not yet know the answer, because, so far, gravitational effects have not been detected at the level of particle reactions." pg. 168

"In 1956, physicists collectively turned pink with embarrassment when two young Chinese-American theorists, Tsung-Dao Lee (then twenty-nine and at Columbia University) and Chen Ning Yang (then thirty-three and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton), pointed out that there was no experimental evidence whatsoever for the validity of parity conservation in weak interactions. They suggested that P violation would help clear up an oddity that had appeared in particle data, and called on experimenters to test the validity of the principle. That same year Lee's Columbia colleague Chien-Shiung Wu undertook an experiment whose results the next year provided dramatic evidence that P conservation, although 'self-evident,' is not true. Almost one once, other groups using other methods confirmed her finding." pg. 171

"One may reasonably claim that conservation laws, being based on the properties of empty space and on other symmetries, are the most profound expressions of physical law. On the other hand, they may be, as once claimed by the eminent mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, mere 'truisms,' because, he asserted, the conserved quantities are defined in just such a way that they must be conserved. I like to think that both points of view can be correct. If the aim of science is the self-consistent description of nature using the simplest set of basic assumptions, what could be more satisfying than to have basic assumptions so elementary, even 'obvious' (such as the uniformity of space and time), that the laws derived from them can be called truisms? The scientist, inclined to call most profound that which is simplest and most general, is not above calling a truism profound. And is it not true that the discovery of anything that remains constant throughout all processes of change is a remarkable achievement, regardless of the arbitrariness of definition involved?" pg. 183

"Whenever you look at a photon (that is, look at a detector, or actually register the photon on the retina of your eye), you see it at a point. When you aren't looking, it is a ghostly wave propagating through space just as electromagnetic waves do in classical theory." pg. 198

"A wave, to be called a wave at all, must have at least one crest and one trough. It must rise and fall--perhaps repeatedly, but at least once. It can't be defined at a point. Its physical extension must be at least as great as its wavelength. So it is the wave nature of the electron, and specifically the wavelength of the electron, that determines the size of an atom. How does the electron decide whether to snuggle up close to the nucleus with a small wavelength, or range far from the nucleus with a large wavelength? Oddly enough, the answer is related to the reason that a marble, set rolling within a curved bowl, finally settles to the lowest point of the bowl. The marble seeks the state of lowest energy. So does the electron." pg. 200

"The lesson: waves are an excellent tool of analysis if the wavelength is much smaller than the thing being analyzed. If the wavelength is much larger than the thing being analyzed, no details can be revealed. The wave has a certain 'fuzziness' dictated by its wavelength." pg. 211

"Nothing--not antimatter or anything else--is truly a source of energy, for energy can only be transformed, not created or destroyed. When you 'consume' energy, you are really transforming it from a more useful to a less useful form (and usually paying for the privilege). Yet it is commonplace (and handy) to talk about energy sources. In everyday usage, an energy source is either stored energy (as in gasoline or a battery--or, hypothetically, in antimatter) or energy in transit (as in solar energy or wind). Among the concepts of physics, energy is the most multifaceted, so there is a rich variety of energy transformations that find practical use.
Energy that is put to use may have been stored for only a little while or no time at all, as in the wind that drives a sailboat. Or it may have been stored for dozens of years, as in the wood that burns in a fireplace. Or for millions of years, as in the coal that fuels a power plant. Or for billions of years, as in the uranium driving a nuclear reactor (its origin being supernova explosions long ago). At the outer limit of store time is the hydrogen that powers the Sun, dating from soon after the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago." pg.

"If you ask, 'What is the momentum of an electron at a particular moment as it moves in its lowest-energy state of motion in a hydrogen atom?' the quantum physicist answers, 'It is a mixture of a vast number of different momenta.' Suppose you persist and ask, 'But can't you measure the electron's momentum and find out what it is?' Then the quantum physicist must answer, 'Yes, I can--and if I do, I find a particular momentum. The very act of measurement selects one among the many mixed momenta.' That is where superposition and probability join hands. If the measurement is repeated many times with many identical atoms, many different results will be achieved. The probability of any particular result is determined by the way in which the different momenta are mixed. They are stirred together with different 'amplitudes,' one for each momentum; and the square of each amplitude gives the probability that that particular momentum will be measured. Now comes a very important point. Superposition does not mean that an electron may have one momentum or another momentum and we just don't know which it has. It means that the electron literally has all the momenta at once. If you can't visualize this, don't worry. Neither can the quantum physicist. He or she has learned to live with it." pg. 228

"When the superposition involves two or more systems that become separated in space, it is usually called entanglement. It's a good word. You can see that the states of the two photos flying apart are indeed entangled--a bit like family members whose lives are entangled no matter how far apart they dwell. But from a fundamental point of view, superposition and entanglement are really the same thing. The reason is that two superposed systems constitute a single system. There is no difference in principle between two superposed states of a single atom and two superposed atoms. The two photons flying apart in the example discussed in the previous paragraph are really parts of a single system. A single wave function describes their joint motion." pg. 231

"In our own solar system, there is some dark matter--namely, the planets and asteroids. But the total mass of all this dark matter is much less than the mass of the Sun. To a good approximation, the mass of the luminous Sun is the same as the mass of the entire solar system. An alien astronomer would not be far wrong if he or she (or it) took account of the mass of the Sun and ignored the mass of unknown and unseen objects in the Sun's vicinity. It was logical to assume that other solar systems would be like our own--a massive central star surrounded by some puny chunks of dark matter. Luminosity, I should add, refers not just to visible light. Astronomers also 'see' objects in the sky with infrared and ultraviolet waves, radio waves, and X rays. Dark matter is truly dark, emitting no detectable radiation of any kind. (Cold matter and massive black holes do radiate a bit, but not enough to be seen over cosmic distances.)" pg. 242-243

"A rhyming word game that my wife and I used to play with our children goes by various names. We call it Stinky Pinky. One person gives a definition, such as 'superior pullover,' and the others try to guess the answer: 'better sweater.' Or they try to figure out that a 'disillusioned mountaintop' is a 'cynical pinnacle.' And so on. what is 'quantum mechanics'? It is an 'eerie theory.' In this book I have used fundamental particles as well as atoms and nuclei to illustrate this point. Physicists themselves often say that their heads swim when they think too hard about quantum mechanics. As I have stated earlier in this book, quantum mechanics is eerie not just because it violates common sense. It is strenge for deeper reason: it deals with unobservable quantities; it shows that nature's fundamental laws are probabilistic; it permits particles to be in two or more states of motion at the same time; it allows a particle to interfere with itself; it says that two widely separated particles can be entangled. All of this leads many physicists to believe that quantum mechanics, despite its long and unblemished record of success in accounting for subatomic phenomena, is incomplete. More and more physicists are agreeing with John Wheeler: 'How come the quantum?' is a good question." pg. 247

Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.

[Jonathan P · Rating 4 out of 5]

For what it sets out to accomplish, it works for sure. Very in depth analysis of quantum mechanics from the technical point of view. Which, at times, doesn’t make for the most page turning reading, and if you’re expecting to dive into a lot of the wilder concepts that quantum mechanics can touch on then this book might not be perfect for you. I would certainly recommend reading this if you’re very interested in the topic and want a good framework before diving into the more thought provoking topics.

[Donato Colangelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dopo tutti questi anni, ancora valido. Certo, alcuni capitoli andrebbero modificati in vista delle scoperte degli ultimi tempi - parliamo pur sempre di un volume pubblicato nel 2004- ma tutto sommato la trattazione è adeguata per il target dei lettori. Ho avuto anche la piacevole sorpresa di imparare qualcosa di nuovo, specialmente sul decadimento delle particelle e sul concetto di “bosone” (e, di riflesso, sulla natura e sulle proprietà del condensato di Bose-Einstein). Il libro è arricchito da appendici molto interessanti e da grafici ed immagini che sono di grande aiuto nella lettura.
Per carità, non pensate che al termine della lettura avrete capito la meccanica quantistica: nessuno la capisce, ci si limita ad una scrollata di spalle e ad un “che volete signora mia, questo è, accettiamolo per quello che è”. Però è una lettura che vale la pena fare, decisamente.
Consigliato!

[Awaz Mebashar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quantum physics for everyone, it gives analogous examples of our daily life to quantum physics, which is not an easy task since at deep level of reality things are very different from higher layers of reality. If you want to know more about history of quantum and particle physics then I recommend this book.

[Jake Leech · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, a book like this has to be pitched to an audience with a given level of familiarity with the topic, and that's going to disappoint people at other levels. That is, a book like this will be too simplistic for some readers and not simplistic enough for others. I have a pretty solid background in chemistry, which means I have some familiarity with electrons and orbitals, and an "I Googled this once" familiarity with a lot of the topics in here. I'm also not too too daunted by simple mathematical equations or "chemical-reaction-style" equations. For me, I think the book was pitched perfectly.

Secondly, as a consequence of that pitch, Ford covers a lot of ground in not a lot of space. Reading straight through can be difficult sometimes, especially when trying to remember the differences between leptons, baryons, fermions, etc. On the other hand, that means that each chunk is individually pretty easily digestible. Having read it once, I think I'd like to own a copy as a perfect me-level reference to individual topics.

[Eva Zeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I actually haven’t finished this book, I stopped at chapter 7. I wanted to learn more about the quantum world, but this book most of the time doesn’t deliver.
When I started reading, I felt quite excited after reading through the first chapter. Then came chapter 2, which is absolutely not cohesive, many times the author jumps from one thought to another, and in a bigger picture it just doesn’t make sense to the reader. And this is true for the most of what I have read through afterwards. It seems that at times, the author is more focused on telling unrelated personal stories or gossip from the life of other great physicists, yet this is not the reason why I wanted to read this book. It tries to talk about science, but it just misses its target.
My father explained string theory to me when I was a teenager and that made much more sense than this book. I doubt I would ever want to finish this book.

[Rian Nejar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A historical, detailed, and descriptive exposition of Quantum Theory.

I picked this book up with an intense desire to learn more about the Quantum world; I'd come across some of its aspects in decades of Semiconductor (chip) design and continuing studies in Physics. While the book began interestingly enough, it soon became a harder slog. I persisted in reading through it in its entirety. Despite the time and effort, I gained very little in addition to what I already knew.

Quantum Physics for everyone? Perhaps not. Not for this engineer and lifelong learner for sure.

[Vicente · Rating 5 out of 5]

De lo mejorcito que he leído sobre cuántica y física de partículas a nivel de divulgación (sin fórmulas) aunque no lo recomendaría para un no-iniciado. Kenneth Ford no se asusta de los conceptos difíciles: diagramas de Feynman, función de ondas, superposición y entrelazamiento cuántico... Consigue transmitir dichos conceptos con un lenguaje simple y ameno.

[Lee Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

为什么要读这本书？
有关量子论的科普书，几乎一年一本。事实上是我是沉迷于不确定性原理和测不准原理诡异的不可知论的形而上学的魅力之中。文艺一点说��我沉醉于薛定谔那只柴郡猫的魅影之中。
费曼说过：“世界上有两种人，懂得数学的人，和不懂得数学的人。不懂数学的人，固然可以能理解物理定律的本性，但永远达不到那种境界”。量子论说的是什么，狄拉克方程与薛定谔方程在那里冷冰冰，阴恻恻的看着你，毫无怜悯之心。谁能从数学的抽象看出万物的本质，什么是真理。见人见智。所以费曼又说：“谁要说他懂了，那么他根本没懂量子力学。”
为什么微观世界的概率会他塌缩成宏观世界的因果，无论是哥本哈根诠释的观察者效应；还是多宇宙假说。都是一种“可笑”的，脑洞大过天的梦呓，但却是一种事实。物理学家最是理性不过，但他们的事实是一切疯了的哲学家都不敢想的东西！这真是天大的玩笑。

[Antonin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This summer I decided that one of my projects for the winter would be to develop a basic understanding of quantum physics. I picked this book as the first to read, mainly because it is "for everyone."

I found it to be very enjoyable. The author explains this complicated subject simply and with humor, making me want to read other books like it. Reading this book was definitely worth my time.

[Bill Solyst · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in highschool. It was a great no math introduction to particle physics for someone at that level.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m an eleven year old who read this book, and I understood it. It was a phenomenal book!

[Karol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelent intro into subject, requires no knowledge of the quantum world.

[Franco Lualdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il sottotitolo trae in inganno. Rimane però un libro fondamentale per comprendere l'infinitamente piccolo e oltre. Indispensabile e tostissimo.

[Ananthch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good effort by Ken, but my advice is to save your time. To sum it up - poor presentation skills. After having spent so much time in the real world where you learn that verbosity is the enemy of communication, there's but one verdict you can offer up to Ford.

To be fair, it's a difficult subject and he's done an okay job of surveying the landscape. There's just too much verbiage devoted to things that aren't really central to getting an idea of what these people are spending their time doing. It's not that that story can't be made short. Making it short takes long. Quality communication is concise and very few people can do that right. Not me for sure :) The golden rule is - tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. If you follow this, the really time-sensitive types can decide to quit on page 1.

What I would have liked to see is :

A timeline - with scientists and the ideas they proposed on the one side and landmark experiments on the other. A third column should show how the arsenal of tools available to the modern scientist has grown and who was responsible for those developments. This would be very valuable "for everyone."
Keep a running list of concepts learned and concepts that have had to be "unlearned." Put that list at the end of each chapter.
Use bold font to your advantage - and anticipate the reader's questions - if you say the total number of electrons, protons and neutrons being even or oddd is what decides if an atom is a boson or fermion - you should give your reader credit for figuring out that only the neutrons count. So is hydrogen a boson and deuterium a fermion? Really?

You can't "make a novel" out of a subject like this. It's ridiculous to think you can.

[Chris Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a great book. To me, quantum theory is truly fascinating, inexplicable, and mind-boggling, and this is probably the most informative book I've read on the subject since developing a minor obsession about it a couple of years ago. ;-)

[Margie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have, after months of struggle, made my way through this book. Do I agree that it was "Quantum Physics for Everyone?" No. Did I learn more about Quantum Physics than when I started the book? Yes. I had no idea there was so many types of particles that were smaller than atoms. I had heard of many of the Physisists, along with their breakthrough theories, who were mentioned. I would say that the main detriment to this book being for "everyone" is that the author asks you to remember too much about foreign concepts as the book goes along. For it to be for "everyone" I feel he needed to remind us every time he mentioned a topic like the behavior of electrons throughout the book, or talk about electrons all together in one chapter. Maybe if the flow of organization made more sense to me, I would have remembered more. However, with that being said, in spite of myself, I learned a lot about the tiny quantum world and have started reading the book again. I think I'll get another book by a different author also because I find the subject in and of itself (as Mr. Spock would say) fascinating.

[LOVEROFBOOKS · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so hoping this would explain physics to me in easily understandable terms. I had to read paragraphs over and over again to retain things and was very frustrated reading this. It sure doesn't seem like a beginners book to me. That being said, I know that I have some math gaps in my education as I was hospitalized several times a year due to pneumonia when I was young. I wanted a book that explained physics to me without me knowing advances mathematics but sadly this isn't it. I saw the high reviews on it and thought it'd be great but I'll have to find another.

This is just one example: "Our golf ball, shrunk back to the actual size of the proton, has a diameter of about -10~18 m. This is equal to one femtometer or 1 fermi (1 fm ). The smallest distance probed in any experiment so far conducted is about one thousandth of a fermi, or -10~18. The fundamental particles, if they have any size at all, are smaller than this." I could very easily insert lots of paragraphs here that were just as confusing as that one to me but I'll let that suffice.

[Maurizio Codogno · Rating 5 out of 5]

La fisica quantistica è incomprensibile. Funziona, la matematica che sta dietro ad essa è assolutamente chiara, ma il suo significato ontologico lascia sempre dubbi. Devo però dire che questo libro fa un lavoro straordinario per dare al lettore almeno un'idea coerente di quello che succede nel mondo quantistico. Ford disegna un ampio affresco storico e logico, ben tradotto da Franco Ligabue, che porta in maniera naturale dal risultato degli esperimenti alle caratteristiche della fisica quantistica. Il punto di base è infatti che - nonostante per esempio Einstein fosse convinto che la teoria non fosse completa e che ci fossero delle variabili non osservabili deterministiche - quello che osserviamo deve per forze avere una componente casuale. Meglio ancora, la teoria classica non riuscirebbe proprio per esempio a dare conto dell'esistenza degli atomi: l'elettrone dovrebbe spiaccicarsi immediatamente dentro il nucleo. In definitiva il libro raggiunge il sacro Graal della divulgazione: "scrivi le cose nel modo più semplice possibile, ma non più semplici di così".

[m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took about 4 books on the subject for me to finally understand why people try to make the philosophical link between quantum physics and spirituality.
I can not claim that I can fully grasp all the scientific principles that are explained and I definitely didn't attempt the review questions at the end of the book, but Ford's statements that most quantum physicists can't visualize all of this, and that thinking about them for too long makes their head spin too...makes me feel less like a fraud when holding these books.
I guess I enjoy a challenge that makes my head spin, and if I reach moments when even for the briefest glimpse I can visualize the "spooky action at a distance" then it was well worth it.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not quite for "everyone": I thought a lot of the concepts in the book were very poorly explained. I have previous read several books on quantum mechanics, and this book was in no way clear, concise, and organized. That definitely doesn't help when dealing with a subject as difficult as quantum mechanics. I really believe though that even such a difficult subject can be explained in terms that a 12 year old could understand, but this book simply does not succeed. My understanding has improved somewhat as a result of reading it, but only slightly. Recommended only if you've already tried other books like "In search of schrodinger's cat."

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Ford explains the unexplainable, in a way that a layperson can understand. If you studied high school physics and chemistry, you'll have a much easier time with this book. Ford's language is relatively simple and straightforward, and he has organized the material in a way that moves from the more easily grasped ideas of quantum physics up to the more exotic. He also sprinkles the book with anecdotes and "fun facts" about the scientists whose research brought us to our current understanding of the quantum world. Recommended if you want to know more about how the universe works on a fundamental level.

[-uht! · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book thinking I'd learn about all the cool, quantum weirdness that has been sensationalized in the media. It's really a book about subatomic particles, though, and can get a bit tedious.

Some things I loved about it:

1. The author's homages to other physicists. He digs being a physicist and it shows. And he loves the accomplishments of others.

2. The disucssion about the particle-wave duality. Probably the best I've read.

3. The discussion about the experiments that led to the theory of nonlocality. I found it fascinating to experience this through the author's eyes.

[Arnav Mendiratta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started reading this at a book store while family was shopping. I just picked up a book for passing my time while my family shopped, oh well, it did pass my time. I read half of the book in 3 hours right there at the book store.

Ford has assumed no per-requisites required and hence, "For everyone". Being from a science background I wish we could go a little more deep into the quantum world but I would still give it a 5 for how this book has been jotted down and presented an idea of quantum physics. Definitely, ignited a spark in me to get profound knowledge in the subject!

[John Kowalczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Particles, particles, and more particles. A good description of the myriad of subatomic particles, paired with explanatory analogies in the everyday macro world and a contextual reference of who discovered them, when, and how. Over 50 diagrams and tables help illustrate and make sense of this nonsensical world of the quantum scale. However, "quantum physics for everyone"? I don't think so. Anyone unfamiliar with what they're getting into might be turned off by the number of particles covered, but Ford does a good job in describing the strangeness of the quantum world for a non-Phd.

[Jef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quantum mechanics is outlined from particle physics (a really good review of particle physics BTW) through some of it's more esoteric results. His explanation of the delayed choice experiment really made more sense than any I had read to date. He does not subscribe to any of the way out explanations for QM like Many Worlds or Universal Mind. Just looks forward to the day when we understand QM better.