Ten Tough, Terrific Quantum Books
This little self-published book by Terry Rudolph, who happens to be Schrodinger’s grandson, gave me a better intuitive grasp of entanglement, superposition and the basics of quantum computing than anything else I’ve read. But other books have helped me too.
February 25, 2024. In May 2020, I set out to learn quantum mechanics the way physicists learn it, with the math. I recently published a memoir about that project, My Quantum Experiment. You can read the book for free on this website or buy it from Amazon as a paperback or e-book. I thought readers might be interested in quantum books I found helpful, so here they are in the order in which I studied them. Their difficulty ranges from HARD (little or no math) to EXTREMELY HARD (lots of math). Although none are easy, all reward hard work. –John Horgan
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman. QED stands for quantum electrodynamics, the theory that legendary physicist Richard Feynman helped invent. I thought this book, based on Feynman’s lectures to non-physicists, would ease me into the quantum realm. Wrong! QED struck me like a slap across the face. I had to study it, to read and re-read it, not because Feynman isn’t clear but because the material is so strange. Wait until you get to what I call the whirligigs. The book has little math but lots of diagrams—for example of light bouncing off glass—that convey quantum concepts. Feynman kindly says we shouldn’t feel bad if we can’t understand quantum physics, because he can’t understand it either. HARD.
Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and co-author. I bought this book by bigshot physicist Leonard Susskind on the recommendation of my smarty-pants friends Jim Holt and Sabine Hossenfelder. Minimum‘s cover says it gives you “what you need to know to start doing physics.” I thought that meant Susskind would teach me the math I needed as he proceeded. Wrong! I had to brush up on trigonometry, logarithms and calculus--and to learn linear algebra and complex numbers for the first time--just to get through Lecture 1. Susskind’s corny, wisecracking style doesn’t help. If Feynman’s QED slapped my face, Susskind’s Minimum punched me. But gradually, painfully, after multiple readings, Minimum helped me intuit, sort of, the mathematical underpinnings of spin, superposition, uncertainty and entanglement. EXTREMELY HARD.
The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by R.I.G. Hughes. After I complained to Jim Holt that quantum math seems weird and arbitrary, Holt recommended this out-of-print book by a philosopher I’d never heard of. Hughes, Holt assured me, reveals the logic underlying quantum math. I only made it through the first 100 pages (out of 350-plus), and for the most part I was baffled. But reading Hughes is like reading poet John Ashbery. You’re baffled, yes, but you keep going because you know you’re in the presence of a deep, wry intelligence, which now and then rewards you with a line that make you smile. “If the inclusion of imaginary numbers is worrying,” Hughes writes, “it is worth considering the sense in which a negative number, –6 say, is real—or, come to that, the sense in which 6 itself is real.” Come on, that’s funny. HARD.
Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics by John Bell. John Bell is the Irish physicist who famously proved in 1964 that before you look at two entangled particles, they do not possess precise properties, such as spin, position and momentum; the particles exist in a blur of superposed possibilities. In this collection of papers, Bell muses over the implications of what came to be called Bell’s theorem and other quantum puzzles. He’s writing for other physicists, not for an ignoramus like me, and I can’t follow his mathematical arguments. But I love reading him, because he’s a graceful, witty, self-deprecating writer, and he represents the antithesis of the shut-up-and-calculate mindset. Bell wants to understand. HARD.
Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, third edition, by David Griffiths and Darrell Schroeter. Griffiths was the textbook for PEP553, a course on quantum mechanics that I took at Stevens Institute of Technology in the fall of 2020. Jim Holt disparages Griffiths as “the Betty Crocker” of quantum instruction, because it serves up mathematical “recipes” with no philosophical reflection. But maybe because I expected so little, I liked Griffiths. I only “read” the first 3.5 chapters, and most of it went over my head, even after my terrific professor, Ed Whittaker, reviewed readings in class. But I enjoyed Griffiths’ blunt, breezy prose, and he helped me (kind of) grok a few evocative concepts. Harmonic oscillators. Normalization. Non-commutativity. The Dirac function. EXTREMELY HARD.
Q Is for Quantum by Terry Rudolph. To be honest, PEP553, the course I took at Stevens, left me feeling a bit depressed. The more I learned about quantum mechanics, the more confused I got. After I whined about my befuddlement online, a guy named Terry Rudolph urged me to read his self-published book Q Is for Quantum. I usually ignore readers’ self-published manuscripts, but Rudolph is unusual. He is a physicist who specializes in quantum foundations; co-founder of a leading quantum-computing company; and grandson of Schrodinger. Rudolph wrote Q Is for Quantum to convey the mathematical essence of quantum mechanics to kids. The book isn’t easy; I had to re-re-read it, and do lots of exercises, to grok Rudolph’s simple but idiosyncratic mathematical system, which involves balls falling in and out of boxes. But Q Is for Quantum “explains” superposition and entanglement--and the basics of quantum computing—better than anything else I’ve read. HARD.
Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson is a quantum computing prodigy-turned-authority who likes puncturing scientific hype. Democritus is a quirky book, a grab-bag of riffs on topics related, sometimes only tangentially, to quantum computing. It’s not as hard or mathy as you might expect, and it’s crammed with arresting insights, conjectures, assertions. It’s worth reading just for Aaronson’s takes on free will (he’s a believer), computational complexity (a method for ranking the hardness of problems) and flaws of conventional quantum-physics education (much harder than it needs to be). HARD.
Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Mechanics by Tim Maudlin. Like his pal David Albert (see below), Tim Maudlin is a philosopher dedicated to explicating quantum mechanics. Part of the pleasure I get reading Maudlin comes from having met him. He’s a hard ass, who loathes obscurantism, mysticism and the shut-up-and-calculate mindset. His book is worth reading if only for its obliteration of the many-worlds model and gentle treatment of the Bohmian pilot-wave model. Like his hero John Bell, Maudlin wants to understand. He is an irresistible force ramming over and over again into an unmovable object. HARD.
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad. Trained as a particle physicist, Barad (they/them) became a professor of feminist studies and philosophy. Barad’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, which they call agential realism, is subtle but powerful—and as true as any interpretation can be. We cannot draw clear lines between objective and subjective knowledge, agential realism implies, and between pure and applied science. We cannot treat what is, what can be and what should be as separate questions; they’re all part of the same hideously tangled world knot. If your metaphysics doesn’t include suffering, injustice and war, you need a new metaphysics. These are my takeaways from Barad’s dense but rewarding book. HARD.
Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Albert. Like Karen Barad, David Albert got a doctorate in physics before becoming a philosopher, one who specializes in making sense of quantum mechanics. He was my guide when I wrote about quantum conundrums for Scientific American in the early 1990s and again during my quantum experiment. After a brief tutorial on vectors, Albert dives into the measurement problem, which he calls the “central difficulty” of quantum mechanics. He ends up in strange places; see for example his riffs on the “many-minds” and “many-stories” interpretations of quantum mechanics and his brain-implant thought experiment. Albert, probably to his horror, helped inspire my “ironic” interpretation of quantum mechanics. HARD
Honorable Mentions: My quantum experiment has ruined my ability to enjoy books on quantum mechanics aimed at a popular audience. Pop books, which have little or no math, seem shallow and hand-wavy now, a waste of time. Below are four exceptions, excellent pop books, by authors with graduate training in physics, that complemented my hard, non-pop readings:
Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon that Reimagines Space and Time—And What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything by George Musser. Exploration of the surprisingly deep historical roots and wild implications of what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Mechanics is Different by Philip Ball. Worth buying just for Ball’s take-down of the many-worlds interpretation and his explication of an interpretation called Ifism.
The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks. Enthralling biography of 16th-century polymath Jerome Cardano, who helped discover the math that underpins quantum mechanics.
What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker. A dramatic history of attempts to explain what quantum mechanics really means.
I also highly recommend Sabine Hossenfelder’s videos on quantum mechanics, one of which goaded me into undertaking my quantum experiment; and the math texts Quick Calculus by Daniel Kleppner and Norman Ramsey and The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra by Shin Takahasi and Iroha Inoue.
Further Reading:
All the above are Further Reading, but if you insist, check out “Stuff I Love Making Students Read.”