Non­fic­tion

Quan­tum Fuzz

  • From the Publisher
May 16, 2017

I look out­side at the snow: frozen water H2O mol­e­cules. If these mol­e­cules weren’t quan­tum enti­ties they wouldn’t exist. (And we wouldn’t exist. If we did exist we would be tiny only as tall as the thick­ness of a human hair but still of our same weight.) I answer my cell phone. (LCD dis­play wires semi­con­duc­tor chips.) Were it not for their quan­tum make­up none of these could exist. Ours is a beau­ti­ful fas­ci­nat­ing quan­tum world. And the under­stand­ing of its quan­tum nature is already respon­si­ble for inno­va­tions account­ing for a third of our econ­o­my. Jew­ish sci­en­tists were promi­nent in the devel­op­ment of that under­stand­ing includ­ing Ein­stein Bohr, Pauli Born Feyn­man, and Gell-Mann, all Nobel lau­re­ates. I wrote this book to pro­vide the thought­ful gen­er­al read­er a math-free jar­gon-free accu­rate view into this quan­tum world. I describe the sci­en­tists involved and inven­tions that have result­ed (from lasers semi­con­duc­tors and HDTVs to super­pow­er­ful quan­tum com­put­ers). All pre­sent­ed in the con­text of the rich his­to­ry in sci­ence and human events of the last 120 years.

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