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Book review: Beyond Weird, by Philip Ball

Philip Ball is a science writer who was for many years an editor for physical sciences at the journal Nature. The subtitle indicates what his book is about. It is aimed at readers of books on popular science who have, Ball believes, been given a misleading impression of quantum physics, starting with the notion that it is 'weird', which Ball thinks is a cop-out. It's non-intuitive but not weird. The idea that it is


comes from our (understandably) contorted attempts to find pictures for visualizing it or stories to tell about it. Quantum physics defies intuition, but we do it an injustice by calling that circumstance 'weird'.



Quantum mechanics has the reputation of being probably the most obscure and difficult branches of science, but Ball insists that it isn't 'hard' in the way that car maintenance or learning Chinese are hard (his examples). That isn't to say that a slight readjustment of our intuitions will make everything suddenly explicable. 'Indeed, it is possible that we might never be able to say what quantum theory "means".' Continue reading

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