BOOK REVIEWS
The latest releases for curious minds
Simply Quantum Physics
IF YOU DON’T LOOK, IT DOESN’T EXIST
■ Author: DK
■ Publisher: DK
■ Price: £9.99 / $12.59
■ Release: Out now
Protons, neutrons, gluons, beta decay, waveparticle duality, Planck’s constant, Schrödinger’s cat – there’s nothing simple about quantum physics whatsoever. We can’t even see the particles (or waves?) it describes with our naked eye because things at a quantum level are billions of times narrower than the width of a human hair. Our most powerful light microscopes can’t even get close to resolving an image of an atomic nuclei, so the only way we can observe something as small as that is with a device that fires other subatomic particles at it – an electron microscope. And we still don’t really understand why Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive, though it does make sense that it would climb into a deadly radioactive box… cats love boxes after all.
It sounds like the authors of Simply Quantum Physics have set themselves an incomprehensible task. But they’ve done a stellar job here, all the while resisting the temptation to fill the pages with hefty terminology and mind-bending thought experiments. It starts with a little bit of history and an eye-popping scale with a length so small we don’t have enough space on the rest of this page to fit all the zeros in, then suddenly we’re completely engaged.