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A review by jasonfurman
Entanglement by Amir D. Aczel
3.0
A decent book on Entanglement. Suffers from my pet peeve in popular science books -- which is repeating lots of material you have read over and over again. You would think that someone coming to a book on Entanglement would have read a few other accounts of quantum mechanics before and doesn't need to re-read the familiar history starting from the Greeks through Planck and Bohr, Heisenberg and the rest of the early pioneers. Or that someone who wants an introduction to quantum mechanics would not want to start with a book that focuses on one aspect. The book also suffers from too much biography, which would be fine if it were not for the fact that it features 20+ scientists -- so that mini-biographies of each weigh down the explication.
The second half is interesting, including both theoretical work like Bell's theorem and the experimental tests of it. You can never really understand this material without going through the actual physics (and even then you can't actually understand it), but the shortness of the explication made one suffer a little more than normal in a book of this sort. Plus there was a lot less on applications of entanglement, like encryption, than I might have liked.
The second half is interesting, including both theoretical work like Bell's theorem and the experimental tests of it. You can never really understand this material without going through the actual physics (and even then you can't actually understand it), but the shortness of the explication made one suffer a little more than normal in a book of this sort. Plus there was a lot less on applications of entanglement, like encryption, than I might have liked.