Well, it wasn't as good as I remember it. Maybe it was the passage of time and the advancement of science, maybe it was my own further studies in the field, maybe it was own growth and change in preferences, or maybe I just things didn't notice the first time. Don't get me wrong; it's still good, and I don't regret having read through it, but Gribbin is certainly not the best writer out there on these subjects. I would recommend Brian Greene, but he always wants to throw a plug in for the wonders of string theory and how it will solve EVERY SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM EVER; IT WILL EVEN CURE CANCER AND OBESITY!!!! Even so, Greene's description of the basic science is unparalleled. If you want an introduction on these matters read the opening two-thirds of either of his books (The Elegant Universe or The Fabric of the Cosmos).

Learning Gotcha: How We Misunderstood Schrödinger’s Cat Learning Gotcha: How We Misunderstood Schrödinger’s Cat

It's unapologetically forthcoming, and NEVER tries to dumb down things in an effort towards becoming more "accommodating" and "plebian", which are the more euphemistic expressions for undervaluing the readers. La prosa del libro es impecable. La capacidad de John Gribbin de despertar la curiosidad y al mismo tiempo ser un buen crítico de la manera como los físicos hemos divulgado o entendemos la teoría cuántica es genial, especialmente al hablar de un tema de tanto interés.

Precisely." The tabby washed her paw. "I am either dead or alive. The same way with subatomic entities - they are either waves or particles. Or they are something else altogether which our puny imaginations can hardly comprehend." Her vocabulary was getting richer. John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. The topical range of his prolific writings includes quantum physics, biographies of famous scientists, human evolution, the origins of the universe, climate change and global warming. His also writes science fiction. It was, however, the final third that made me sit up, and read & re-read things, only to understand them. That part dealt with actual state of quantum theory, and needs considerable conceptual clarity, which is not so easy to muster at my stage.

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The story seems to be that Quantum Mechanics is so weird, a cat can be both alive and dead until we look! This implies that the cat or anything in the box is a wave function accompanied by myriad ghost realities that will collapse into a single reality (dead or alive cat) when you decide to see it. Till then it is undead. Schrödinger's story is a critique of the idea of quantum blurriness. But, some pop sci author read the story, thought it was meant to be interpreted literally ("Large felines can exhibit quantum blurriness") and countless others retell the explanation, not the story. It's like hearing that the Emperor's New Clothes is about the eye-opening power of fashion without reading the tale yourself. Nevertheless, if you want to get acquainted with the strange & beautiful world of quantum theory, this is indeed the best introduction that you can procure.

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat)... In 1984, Gribbin published In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, the book that he is best known for, which continues to sell well 28 years after publication. It has been described as among the best of the first wave of physics popularisations preceding Stephen Hawking's multi-million-selling A Brief History of Time. Gribbin's book has been cited as an example of how to revive an interest in the study of mathematics. Elon Musk: "Reading the source material is better than reading other people's opinions about the source material." Yes: There are fuzzy "infinitely small" quantities that blip away to 0 when we measure them, but are non-zero in their own world. These tiny quantities can interact with each other and can predict how our "macroscopic" numbers behave.

gribbin's great because he won't dumb down but genuinely wants you to understand this stuff. and b/c he believes in time travel. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks. I was a bit uneasy. Needless to say, talking cats appearing out of nowhere and speaking in riddles was not usual in my daily routine. I started eyeing my Stephen King collection uneasily. "Who are you?" I asked.

I scanned my bookshelves. Suddenly illumination lit up on me. "Bulgakov! The Master and Margarita!" I exclaimed. For me now it has become apparent that time travel, teleportation, antimatter and multiple realities are well established phenomena of physics, not of unhealthy imagination.

I looked behind me. A tabby was sitting, contentedly washing herself. "Hey! Where did you come from?" I asked. The third part probes some of the deeper mysteries, possibilities and paradoxes of quantum mechanics.Oh... Now I remember." I said. (I did only vaguely - but I wanted to save myself from getting scratched, which I seemed to be in imminent danger of.) "Wasn't he the famous quantum scientist?" Both events happened, but we don't know which alternate universe we're in. Maybe every possible outcome creates a new timeline. (I flip a coin and put it under my hand. Are we in a spooky quantum state?) Overall, probably not unexpectedly, it changes your perception of a huge variety of reality aspects. The most striking for me was thought about the history: "In this delayed choice experiment something we do now has an irretrievable influence on what we can say about the past. History at least for one photon depends upon how we choose to make a measurement… Philosophers have long pondered the fact that history has no meaning - the past has no existence - except in the way it is recorded in the present." I think it has become even more relevant in our media savvy days when wars are played and won more on screen than at the actual battles fields. It feels surreal to find the natural phenomenon facilitating such an interpretation of the social reality.