My friend Louisa Gilder gets a rave from Nature for her new book The Age of Entanglement . . .
Gilder writes a delightfully unconventional history in the form of conversations — real or reconstructed — among the physicists themselves. She emphasizes the recent history of Bell’s theorem, which concerns correlations between the quantum properties of separated elementary particles, its experimental tests and the subsequent exploitation of quantum entanglement in quantum computing, quantum information theory and quantum teleportation.
Gilder’s is, on balance, the better book [Don Howard reviews another physics book, too], partly because of the conversational format, which brings the scientist actors to life as complex personalities with interesting lives. Especially enjoyable are the portraits of the less famous physicists who, starting in the 1960s, put entanglement to the test and taught us how to engineer with it, starting with John Bell and including Abner Shimony, John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger.
. . . and she speaks at length with George Johnson about her book and the very latest quantum developments, including a very cool phenomenon called “entanglement swapping.”
