Dance of the Photons: Einstein, Entanglement and Quantum Teleportation

by Anton Zeilinger

A Nobel Laureate explains quantum entanglement and teleportation and why Einstein was wrong about the nature of reality

What is the true nature of reality? To find out, Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger takes us (along with his fictional students Alice and Bob) on a voyage through a quantum wonderland, explaining entanglement, teleportation, time-travel paradoxes and why our view of the world must change.

Originally published in America in 2012, a new Afterword in the light of the author's 2022 Nobel Prize means the book brings readers up-to-date with the most recent developments in quantum teleportation. This describes the author's collaboration to perform the first intercontinental video call encrypted using quantum cryptography, and how Chinese scientists teleported entangled quantum states to an orbiting satellite. Readers also learn how both volunteer humans and astronomical objects billions of light years away have been part of experiments to conclusively prove that quantum states cannot provide a full description of reality at a local level.

Einstein had always refused to accept aspects of quantum theory, deriding the notion of instantaneous communication between faraway 'entangled' particles as 'spooky action at a distance'. However, this playful yet deep book takes readers through a series of ingenious experiments conducted in various locations that demonstrate entanglement is indeed real, and speculates that information is an essential part of reality.

From a dank sewage tunnel under the River Danube to the balmy air between a pair of mountain peaks in the Canary Islands, with various time-travel paradoxes explained along the way, the author and his fictional physics students Alice and Bob demonstrate the true nature of quantum entanglement and teleportation using photons, or light quanta, created by laser beams. The ideas described have laid the foundations for a new era of quantum technology, including the development of quantum computers and much more.

Genres: Science

312 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 25, 2023

About the author

Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum physicist who in 2008 received the Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK) for "his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information". Zeilinger is professor of physics at the University of Vienna and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information IQOQI at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most of his research concerns the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.

Anton Zeilinger is a pioneer in the field of quantum information and of the foundations of quantum mechanics. He realized many important quantum information protocols for the first time, including quantum teleportation of an independent qubit, entanglement swapping (i.e. the teleportation of an entangled state), hyper-dense coding (which was the first entanglement-based protocol ever realized in experiment), entanglement-based quantum cryptography, one-way quantum computation and blind quantum computation. His further contributions to the experimental and conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics include multi-particle entanglement and matter wave interference all the way from neutrons via atoms to macromolecules such as fullerenes.

Reviews

[Mika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zeilinger writes about quantum mechanics and theory with so much zest and enthusiasm, it's infectious. I'm still confused as hell and it would be preposterous to claim I understand quantum mechanics because of this book. Still it is by far the best explanation of the core ideas of quantum theory, particularly the uncertainty principle, local realism, Bell inequalities. The true gift of this book is its ability to impart on you what makes quantum such a compelling domain of study, what drives experimentalists to meticulously observe photons and why theorists are so impassioned about what these photons' behaviours says about our reality and our perception of reality.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea and the experimental realisation of "quantum teleportation" (not at all like on Star Trek, but still pretty mind-boggling) is at the heart of this book, by a leading experimenter in the field. But before getting there it thoroughly introduces the weirdness of quantum entanglement more generally, the EPR paradox and Bell's theorem. If you're a fan of this kind of book you may well feel, as I do, that it's always worth going over this stuff yet one more time, in hope of understanding it just that little bit better than you did last time and you will find that Zeilinger does a good job of explaining it. In particular I think it contains the clearest explanation of Bell's theorem, in its simplicity and its depth, that I have ever read. Four stars because it is not dazzlingly written, nor does it deal much with broader philosophical issues of quantum theory. But it is a good, plain explanation of its subject.

[Mangoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2022 Anton Zeilinger won the Physics Nobel prize together with John Clauser and Alain Aspect for his contribution to establishing experimentally facts that the quantum theory had implied or predicted several decades earlier, particularly starting from John Bell's analysis of the so-called EPR paradox in the light of the De Broglie-Bohm theory. Professor Quantinger (as he calls himself in the book) has been a wizard in developing the mathematics (for instance, the GHZ version of Bell's argument without inequalities), the technology and the experimental setups needed to test superposition and interference of macroscopic objects, and particularly the facts and consequences of entanglement, including quantum teleportation.
This book presents his (group) efforts along this challenging and highly rewarding path in a simple and entertaining way, starting from giving body and reasoning to Alice and Bob in understanding Bell's theorem from the ground up (from the experimental data, that is) and then moving to quantum teleportation. The treatment is kept simple, although the arguments are pristine in spite of the simplified presentation (particularly in the paper presented in Appendix). Along the way, Zeilinger introduces some opinion and historical facts, though his view of the ontology of what his experiments revealed is not fully detailed - he is fair in concluding that Bell's theorem, once confirmed experimentally, sheds light on non-intuitive facts about the structure of the world, however he leaves the door open to all interpretations, from non-locality to non-realism (he seems not to get any issue with the old-school anti-realist view of Bohr, in fact alluding at a slight sympathy for it). On top, here and there in the cracks of the arguments he delivers pearls of wisdom that are deep and thoughtful, as only a wizard can gather. Finally worth mentioning his modesty, as in the afterwards added after the price (the book was originally written more than a decade before) he does not even mention it.