The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn Available to Purchase

To the world-at-large, Einstein’s name is indelibly associated with the theory of relativity. But to Einstein himself relativity was only “a sort of respite which I gave myself during my struggles with the quanta” (p. 54). It was a struggle he lost. Shortly before his death, almost half a century after his 1905 photoelectric paper, he resignedly wrote “All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken” (p. 328). One way or another, the question is still with us. Of course now, as then, there is no shortage of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys who will confidently tell you the answer. But since they say different things, the skeptic is entitled to suspect that no one really knows. And that is the subject of Gilder’s book: The...