Quantum: A guide for the perplexed by Jim al-Khalili, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99, ISBN 0297843052 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
“THERE is something fascinating about science,” Mark Twain famously wrote. “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
Twain’s words sprang to mind as I was leafing through Jim Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A guide for the perplexed. For, never in the history of science can so trifling an investment of fact have spawned so fabulous a wealth of extraordinary consequences as in the case of quantum theory.
The central fact is remarkably easy to state: in…
