Schrödinger’s kittens and the search for reality, John Gribbin (ISBN 9781857994025, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

After reading In Search of Schrödinger’s cat by John Gribbin I decided to also read this sequel not really knowing what to expect. His first book is a more or less traditional explanation of quantum mechanics and its bizarre description of reality. Ever since its conception physicists and philosophers have been struggling with the interpretation of quantum mechanics. This has been so difficult that the physicist community in general stopped trying to understand quantum mechanics at a fundamental level and limited itself to using quantum mechanics to calculate and predict. The first book came out in 1984 and Schrödinger’s kittens came out 11 years later in 1995. In the years between the 2 books there was a renewed interest in the physics community for the interpretation of quantum mechanics. One example was research in cosmology and the so called wave equation of the universe. The standard Copenhagen interpretation could not easily applied to the universe as a hole. Schrödingers kittens discusses various alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics and at the end the author motivates his own favorite choice. Although I found this book very interesting and from a content point of view actually better than the first book, I also believe that this book is more of a special interest book while the first one is better suited as a general introduction to quantum mechanics. In fact, without knowing what is covered in the first book this one will be hard to follow.