In search of Schrodinger’s cat, John Gribbin (ISBN 978-0-552-12555-0, Transworld Books)

I had this book lying around for a long time (it first came out in 1984 but I read the edition from 2012) and finally decided to give it a go. Mainly because of John Gribbin’s and the book having a bit of a reputation as a classic. I have already read many popular books about quantum mechanics which is why I left this one sitting on the shelf as I doubted what more could be told. But, to my surprise there was novelty compared to the books I had read before. In a nutshell this book is more modern in the description of quantum mechanics in the sense that it focuses more on the current status of quantum mechanics and limits the coverage of the historical development to these elements that are necessary to understand what the theory is about, what the successes are and why there is still debate. As a result a lot of pages are devoted to the Einstein-Bohr debates and to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Linked to this Bell’s inequality and the experiments by Alain Aspect to prove this inequality in favor of quantum mechanics are discussed. The book ends with a discussion of the multiverse as an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation that the author particularly likes. The main message of the author is that quantum mechanics is right and a strictly causal and deterministic theory as adhered to by Einstein is wrong but the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is unsatisfactory and reduced quantum physics to a cook book with recipes without generating true understanding and a satisfactory world view. In this sense this book is much broader than some of the other books I have read on the subject. If you are really interested in the controversies around the interpretation of quantum mechanics then I can recommend David Wick’s The Infamous Boundary : Seven Decades of Heresy in Quantum Mechanics. You can still find it on Amazon. Not everybody likes it, not surprising with such a title.