Review: Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this book exploring the origins and rollout of the The Copenhagen interpretation; the meaning of quantum mechanics that was largely devised in the years 1925 to 1927 by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities that measurements will produce certain results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse. There have been many objections to the Copenhagen Interpretation over the years. These include: discontinuous jumps when there is an observation, the probabilistic element introduced upon observation, the subjectiveness of requiring an observer, the difficulty of defining a measuring device, and more which Einstein railed against as "God playing dice" and
"spooky action at a distance" as his complaints are often paraphrased.

This audiobook, well-narrated, nicely balances the technical exposition with the human foibles (Bohr's peevishness, Schrödinger's skirt-chasing, etc.) with an amazing period of recasting our understanding of the nature of reality against the backdrop of WW I and WW II. After charting the fevered work around the Solvay Conferences and other places and the balkanization of the theoretical physicists into the Einstein-Schrödinger axis of realism and determinism (or at least the hope to find proof of those things) and the Bohr-Heisenberg axis embracing uncertainty and an observer-dependent reality,the book explores more recent alternatives to the Copenhagen Interpretation including the refuted Bell's inequality and Hugh Everett III's proposed many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation.

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