Review: Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation

Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation by Anton Zeilinger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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". So, it is great that someone so close to this exciting topic of quantum entanglement has taken the time to author an explanatory tome for a popular audience. However, he chose to do much of the explanation in long stories about students doing experiments which the narrator L. J. Ganser makes to effort to enliven with different voices. So, it is like someone reading screenplay without differentiating the characters.

Some takeaway I did make:

Einstein's principle of Local Realism, the combination of the principle of locality (limiting cause-and-effect to the speed of light) with the assumption that a particle must objectively have a pre-existing value (i.e. a real value) for any possible measurement, i.e. a value existing before that measurement is made, is the key concept challenged by instantaneous information transmission in quantum entanglement.

And,

Bell's theorem (here Bell's Inequality) states that any physical theory that incorporates local realism cannot reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanical theory. Because numerous experiments agree with the predictions of quantum mechanical theory, and show differences between correlations that could not be explained by local hidden variables, the experimental results have been taken by many as refuting the concept of local realism as an explanation of the physical phenomena under test.

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