How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog

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Maybe a dog person would find Chad Orzel’s attempts to talk quantum mechanics in the language of a pet and her owner more endearing. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is Yet Another Pop Sci look at quantum mechanics, albeit one from a more technical than, say, historical perspective. Orzel frames each chapter within a conversation with his dog, Emmy, grounded in the context of something a dog would do, like hunt bunnies or eat treats. Unfortunately, the writing tries too hard to be cutesy and funny. I found this device far too distracting and cheesy for my tastes, and it adds very little to Orzel’s explanations. Another facet of the accessibility of this book is that is has very little math. Physics is sometimes defined as the mathematical explanation of the physical world, so how can you do physics without math? The answer is simple. Dogs can’t count, let alone calculate square roots so the author uses concrete examples using bunnies, squirrels and dog treats to illustrate concepts like particle-wave duality and quantum tunneling. Certain other parts of this book, like explaining quantum Zeno effect and quantum teleportation, I think, could have been done in a better manner. The author was focussing too much on explaining these using dog equivalents that the details of the experiments were missing and it was simply confusing.

Well then. If a particle can be in different positions at once, and lose its haecceity (the characteristics that define a thing as a particular thing, also known in philosophical literature by the funny expression "thisness"), then we are really not dealing with tiny billiard balls at all, are we? I've had to think a while before deciding on the score for this one. With a more fine-grained rating system I'd give it 3.5 stars, but given how much fun I've had while also learning new things have pushed it to 4 stars on Goodreads. Consider a simple object, say a red, squishy ball. An adult recognises the object as a ball first, and then identifies properties attached to the object - round, spherical, squishy, red. An infant would not do this. An infant would recognise the properties first: there's something bright, it is squishy to the touch, and it feels the same way whichever way I hold it. Later on, the infant learns to refer to this bundle of properties by using a shortcut phonetic code. This code is the word 'ball'. Through usage, the infant will then learn to replace the bundle of properties with the linguistic label. At that point, the transition will be complete - the ball will have properties, the bundle of properties will no longer exist independently of its physical carrier, as they used to do in the observer's infancy. Metaphors are not helpful in getting to grips with non-empirical subjects! So, Chad, would you please stop with the dog and the squirrels. I thought you explained the physics well, and I liked your book for these explanations, but I found myself skipping over the animal-metaphors very early on. I know that dog of yours is a brain-box, but I must confess I liked your book despite its unique selling point, rather than because of it.So the idea that an elementary particle is a tiny billiard ball that interacts with others just as its macroscopic counterparts in a game of pool (or snookers) is deeply ingrained, and I cannot shake it. But the insights of quantum physics tell a story that is simply irreconcilable with this mental picture. For one thing, these particles do not have a well-defined position. Before we try to measure the position, there is a chance that we will find the particle here, there, and everywhere. And in the case of these 'particles', this is not just a phrase! The normal state of a particle is "superposition", a state in which it exists in different positions at once. Another thing that is vaguely unsettling is that a particle can be part of a system in which it gives up its individual existence. In the spooky phenomenon called "entanglement", two particles duplicate each other's properties but also the range of spacetime points at which they may be encountered by a measuring observer. So, does it still make sense to speak of entangled particles in the plural? Are there really 'two'? What happens to the ultra-fundamental human concept of countability when we deal with entangled states? If you kindly devote some of your time to reading this review, you may become frustrated. Because I am not referring directly to Chad's book very much. I am expressing thoughts that were triggered through my reading of his book, and I find these thoughts fascinating. Still, there is a link to the book, and you will find it in the middle of my blurb under the heading "A message to Chad". Anybody who was forced by their physics teacher at school to comment on the way that iron filings orientate when brought into proximity with a magnet knows what the classical interpretation of a field is. A classical field is a near-physical object in which every point has a uniquely measurable identity. I can measure the strength of a magnetic field in any one location. I can measure the force between a probe and the charge of an electric field at any point in the field. Who knows. Language has developed to describe things that we need to talk about because they happen in a world accessible to our sensory toolkit. Quantum things do not. So we are left with metaphors. I have started to think about particles as a kind of non-local 'fog' that is spread out across the entire universe, with different densities at different, specific, spacetime locations. The particles detected by particle detectors are more like ripples in a field, or "excitations of the sensory material", as German philosopher and physicist Meinard Kuhlmann said in a recent article in Scientific American ("What is Real?", in Physics at the Limits, Scientific American Special Edition Winter 2015). I'm still utterly bewildered by quantum mechanics, but dang Orzel sure did try. An excellent book. He helped me understand the uncertainty principle in a way I never had before, and if I couldn't quite make the leap to its application in the subsequent chapters, well, I truly don't think the fault lies with the author. I learned a ton, even if I still find it all too slippery to fully grasp.

It was heavy reading in all, whilst I relatively enjoyed it, I wouldn't read it again and by the last couple of chapters I found myself almost forcing myself to complete the read... Well. For some time while I was reading the book, I was in two minds about my rating. In fact, I was in five minds, one for each potential rating for the book. I existed in a state of superposition of five allowable states at once, and the state vector describing this phenomenon is:

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As far as the quantum mechanics go, the development is fairly standard. It’s hard for me to approach books like this from the eyes of a first timer, because I’ve read so many—I don’t pretend that means I know a lot about quantum mechanics, but you do start to hear the same stories over and over. We are quite fortunate to live during a renaissance in books about quantum mechanics, so really, you are spoiled for choice. I don’t think How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is going to make it onto my list of recommended physics reads, though. So it seems that the new and alien world of quantum physics may provide more than a deeper understanding of nature. If understood well, it may re-define our relationship with language itself, and remind us that words are simply shortcuts that we use to define bundles of properties. If we managed to understand this fact consciously, we would enhance our ability to grasp the dynamics around us on a philosophically deeper level than ever before. We would be able to recognise the limitations of language, and in so doing re-define somewhat the idea that we and 'reality' are somehow disparate entities. The study of quantum physics, combined with a conscious re-definition of how we perceive reality, may lead us again to the insight that a conscious intellect is the 'unverse observing itself', and even cross Wittgenstein's barrier that language is the final obstacle to reality. Still. There is something that still leaves me unsatisfied. I am perfectly happy, on one level, to learn the maths required and think about 'particles' as state-vectors, and of their propagation as 'probability-waves', but there is something still missing. I still want to develop an intuitive understanding of these processes, I am not entirely content to leave them consigned to the realm of abstract mathematics. But if we thought of objects as abstract bundles of properties, we would find it easier to intuit the world of quantum dynamics. What we used to call a 'particle' is a collection of properties. These properties do not need a physical carrier to exist meaningfully, and as they do not, neither do they need a linguistic label that fixes a mental picture that robs them of this free existence. The properties are mass, charge, and spin, and also position and momentum.