As a teacher in secondary school I'm always looking for books that can help me teach my core classes in new and interesting ways. This book does a great job of taking a complex subject and turning into something you actually want to read plus help create new lesson plans!

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. I don’t have a background in science so I was lost at times during this book but overall I understood the author’s explanations.

Ah, physics, my love. It's so easy to forget you. You make yourself a tough mistress to keep – one has to always pay you attention to even remember how to talk to you or read you. But when one does, there is such a big reward.

Physics is like magic. Especially quantum physics. And reading Real Quanta helped me remember why I loved it so much. Why I studied engineering, although I don't work in the field, and how I still don't regret all those physics classes I took (quantum physics as well.) I might not remember the equations now (although I did ace them at the time) but I remember that I basically studied MAGIC. And I remember how it felt. This book brought me right back.

You sense the love for the magic of physics dripping from the pages. And what is the love for physics, if not for the love for how magically the world is built? How incredible it actually is, when you try to look beyond the surface of simple everyday objects that we take for granted and forget how actually complicated everything around us is and how perfectly it keeps ticking, like a precise clock, but without having to be wound up?

So What Is This Book Really About?

Real Quanta is comprised of the author's monologue, although it's meant to be his dialogue with Einstein and Bohr, the two great physicists who shaped what quantum physics is today. It's written in a simple manner, maybe not exactly for a layman because you have to know some basic scientific facts, but there are definitely no equations or anything too complicated. Safe to say it's popular science, and if you've ever loved physics, you'll be able to read it just fine. There's a lot of history of physics, but it doesn't bore you at all – it's told with interesting detail, for example, did you know that a lot of theories came to be while the physicists were "vacationing", and with their mistresses, no less? Or that the famous double slit experiment was actually just Feynman's lecture tool, not actually performed till much later? All of this detail makes the book an easy and engaging read. It's more of a history of quantum mechanics and quantum physics than any real science stuff of in depth explanations – the whole point of the book though is to show you that quanta don't exist solely in CERN laboratories – you're made of them. Your devices function because of them. YOU function because of them. (The part I liked best was that the spinach in your fridge is actually a quantum computer. I am not kidding.)

Overall...

If you're a student and you take physics – read Real Quanta. It will definitely give you some inspiration for those classes, especially if you're struggling with them. Or if you used to take physics and loved it – read it as well, if just to remember all of that wonder that it might have made you feel. It made me feel like I want to take up a quantum mechanics class, again. Never you mind that I'd first have to take a few years of maths and general physics to get to where I can remember anything at all!

I thank Dundurn for giving me a free copy of the book in exchange to my honest opinion. Receiving the book for free does not affect my opinion.

Real Quanta: Simplifying Quantum Physics for Einstein and Bohr is a translation and re-release of the original 2015 Dutch edition: Echt quantum by Martijn van Calmthout. Translated and released in English by Tessera translations and published by Dundurn press, it clocks in at 192 pages and is available in ebook and paperback formats.

There were a lot of things to like about this book. It's a physics book aimed firmly at laymen, not physicists. There's a lot of history and background here and the author has a deft hand at making potentially dry history both interesting and relevant. There are many many quotes and anecdotes from Richard Feynman (and other physicists and learned folks) and that's wonderful. I liked the author's take on the fantasy conversations which could happen if you could listen in on Bohr and Einstein chatting at lunch with updated information which hadn't been discovered when they were alive.
There are quaintly appealing line drawings and chapter headers by Wietse Bakker.

That being said, this book is clearly translated and the English version is somewhat awkward in places. It's not overpoweringly annoying or unreadable by any stretch of the imagination, but it is noticeable. Additionally, science books aimed at laymen often have a tough job being 'enough but not too much'. I found myself wanting somewhat more concrete information out of this book. Deciding what to include is a necessarily difficult and limiting job for any technical author and I think he did a good job, I just personally found myself wanting more. I would unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in science and especially science history.

Enjoyable and easy to read in translation.

Four stars.

A good explanation of something we can’t understand.

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics. This is a quote used early on in ‘Real Quanta’, a book which attempts to explain the unexplainable field of science known as quantum physics. The book is structured as an imaginary conversation in a restaurant with two famous physicists, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and runs through a comprehensive list of quantum concepts such as entanglement, quantum computers and Schrödinger’s equation.

The science discussed in the book is fairly complex and the author does a good job of explaining most of the ideas. The hypothetical conversations with Einstein and Bohr work well as they connect the book together and offer the reader a break from the heavy physics; in fact, I would say there could be more of these sections in the book as the history and backgrounds of the scientists are often very interesting when touched upon. The book is readable and doesn’t get bogged down in terminology which probably helps readers with no experience of quantum mechanics; there is also a glossary of terms at the end of the book.

The biggest issues I had with the book are its structure and target audience. The first few chapters read like a long introduction, touching upon many concepts but not properly explaining them. Later on, the chapters start to become more focused, but there is still a sense of rambling and not many summaries of each concept. Often ideas are mentioned but not explained until later on in the book and the focus often seems to go off on a tangent, starting to explain something and then realising more concepts are necessary to explain the first idea and so explaining them instead. This is probably common for a book of this nature, where a wide range of ideas are touched upon but never properly explored in detail or depth (in fairness, hundreds of books would probably be required to do so).

The target audience is a bit unclear; the book is a summary of a wide field of science and so in that regard, it is probably best suited for a beginner who knows nothing about quantum physics. Yet it occasionally does become a bit heavy and I’m not sure someone with no prior knowledge would be able to follow everything. The book does not contain any diagrams or equations, which could potentially help someone with a non-science background to pick up some of the more advanced stuff.

In conclusion, this book does a good job explaining many quantum ideas and has a clever initial idea with the Einstein/Bohr meeting. However, it suffers from winding explanations and could do with tightening up and further organisation of chapters to make it more accessible for a beginner to the quantum world.

Boromir

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

I enjoyed this book, not just for van Calmthout's simple explanation of quantum physics and history of the major players in the field, but for the way he ties that into the everyday things we take for granted, like smartphones. He explores quantum science's past and future through a make-believe conversation with Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr, which I found entertaining.

The idea of this book is to demystify quantum physics, and to explain that the quantum world is not a strange, ephemeral world divorced from everyday reality, but a major and integral part of it. The author formulates his explanation as an imaginary discourse with Einstein and Bohr – scientists who were instrumental in the initial research into quantum phenomena – in order to ‘update’ them on how far research in these areas had evolved.
I felt the conceit of the meeting of the author with Einstein and Bohr for coffee at the Hotel Metropole, and the scattered German phrases attributed to Einstein, were more of a distraction than a help to the explanations of quantum theory.
The book is written in a mixture of formal scientific and colloquial language, that can be irritating at times. I would have preferred a straight forward didactic tone.
There is a lot of presupposed knowledge in this book. Some ideas are gone into with a lot of detail, while others start with a great leap in the dark for non-physicists.
But apart from these minor niggles, I did enjoy reading the book – although, I really cannot claim to have understood anywhere near everything. I still find the weirdness of quantum mechanics (electrons being simultaneously particles and waves) easier to accept, than the classical physics of electromagnetism. Electricity is quite beyond me. Perhaps that is due to studying maths – where visualising everything is not necessary, and imaginary numbers are routine. One if the explanations I found particularly good was that of quasiparticles, described as “a bit like a Mexican wave in a football stadium, which isn’t really an object, but does have a position and speed”.
At a rough guess, I would say that almost everybody who won a Nobel prize in Physics since 1900 gets a mention in this book, and it was quite fun to try to work out how many of them I had come across before.
The story became really fascinating for me, when the quantum effects in biology were mentioned. Photosynthesis in chloroplasts can only be understood in terms of quantum physics: “Plants really are quantum computers … the energy of the collected photons doesn’t take a random walk to the reaction center – it’s a quantum walk … they try out all possible routes at the same time, and only the quickest one is then taken”.
It has been known for some time that birds navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field – but apparently “a robin also needs light before it is able to detect the magnetic field” – the light interacting with the magnetism in the robin’s brain in a quantum manner.
There is a section on quantum computers, which are “in principle capable of looking at all options in a single calculation step and finding the optimum. That one calculation step can take weeks or months of preparation if necessary, but ultimately the answer is obtained much more quickly than by the brute force approach” used by conventional computers.
The whole ethos of this book is summed up near the end: “Quanta are strange, to be sure, but it isn’t black magic. I’d prefer to say it’s the most beautiful thing physics has ever discovered. If there’s one thing that is strange, … it’s the everyday classical world. The real mystery is why it is so predictable and unambiguous.”
This is a book that is both fascinating and bewildering – just like its subject.

An Appealing "History of Science" Companion to Your Textbook

I don't think this is the book I'd start with for an overview of basic principles of quantum physics. It's all in there, but touched upon in a fashion that almost presupposes you already know the underlying principles. Rather, this book adds in personalities, disputes, disagreements, and leaps forward, and sets it all in a timeline that makes the progress and development of thinking about quantum issues very clear.

Along the way we learn things like, what was the personal relationship between Bohr and Einstein? Why was the Solvay conference of 1927 so important? Why was Max Plank's earlier work the basis for so much quantum physics progress? Why did Einstein receive a Nobel, and how did his experiments lay the groundwork for thinking about particles versus waves? All of that is set out clearly and engagingly in the early chapters of this book, but as I say you might need to know a little bit about the underlying physics to see how it all fit together and evolved.

As you might suspect, as the book proceeds things get tougher. I finally hit the wall at Bose-Einstein condensates. Luckily, it's just about at that halfway point that we switch gears and move into a discussion of potential practical applications of quantum physics. The discussion of quantum cryptography and then of quantum computing is interesting and reasonably accessible, (probably because we are still at a basic and speculative stage in our thinking). From there we move on to spooky action at a distance, and this ended up being one of the clearer discussions of that topic that I've encountered.

You also realize, over and over, that a lot of quantum physics is what it is because the math says so, and whether it feels right or looks right from a classical perspective just doesn't matter. Which also, of course, suggests that there's more going on than we suspect or at this point can conceive. And it's at this later point in the book that we wander into uncharted territory. There are discussions of teleportation, quantum biology and the quantum aspects of photosynthesis, quantum reality, many worlds theories, and so on. This part is thinner, but interesting enough.

So, my bottom line was that this was fairly accessible, strong as history, and written to appeal to general but motivated readers. It offered a sometimes quirky but generally engaging perspective on popular topics, and certainly added to my understanding. A nice general purpose find.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This is a book about Einstein and how his theories have extrapolated into Quantum Physics. It's written in an accessible way, much like a novel, though it does read a little dry at times.

The author places himself in a scene where he is interviewing the famous scientists Einstein and Bohr and explains within that context some of the prevailing theories of Physics that came from their studies and ideas. This is definitely a book for people who are very interested in these theories, but for those of us in that category it is amazingly easy to follow and the fictional aspect of the 'interview' seems like a little fun.

This would also be a good book for a student about to study Physics who might find it intimidating. There are no equations to decipher, just theory on a philosophical level that any reasonably intelligent person could follow.

I will admit upfront that I have a deep fascination with physics. I can’t say that I even remotely understand the mathematics but the thought experiments, the layman’s descriptions of complex ideas, and the understanding of what makes things work have intrigued me since childhood.

Martijn van Calmthout has written a very accessible book about the value of quantum mechanics in our everyday life. He starts with a history of the development of the science of quanta, The physicists involved and how they built off of one another. The language is not that of science but that of a teacher. He explains how our smartphones use quantum mechanics. Why semiconductors are so useful. He even explains how chemistry uses the principles to formulate new pharmaceuticals.

I applaud this effort in understanding our realities.

I wish to thank the Dundrun Group, Martijn van Calmthout, and NetGalley for my copy in exchange for my honest review.

Real Quanta: Simplifying Quantum Physics for Einstein and Bohr by Martijn van Calmthout is a layman’s look at quantum physics. Calmthout is the editor of exact subjects and surroundings, physicist, science expert and fancier, Einstein biographer, author of popular scientific books, host in the monthly KennisCafé in de Balie and radio presenter De Kennis van Nu (NTR).

There are many books explaining physics to layman from unknown writers to television celebrities like Michio Kaku. The basic concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics are available to all who have access to a library. This does not mean the reader will absorb all the mathematics and become an expert, but like classical physics, most people know how it works without the mathematics -- action-reaction, bodies in motion…

Newtonian physics plays a role that we see in everyday life. We drop things. We feel the force of being thrown forward against seat belts during a sudden stop. We may not like the effects but we have learned to accept them. Quantum interactions take place at subatomic levels and Relativity takes place on the huge scale of the galaxies and the universe. Both do affect us since we are made of organized collections of subatomic particles and live in the universe. We just don’t experience it with our senses.

What it holds for mankind may be far greater than tunneling diodes. Computers are made of transistors but many people (younger than the transistor radio era) may not have seen a single transistor, but rather the millions put on an integrated circuit or chip. Science is at its limit of shrinking transistor sizes. Quantum physics may off the answer with quantum computing bits will no longer be a 1 or 0 they will become 1, 0, or both. Searching with a quantum computer would explore all possible answers at once instead of one at a time. Amazingly fast but it would kill credit card encryption algorithms.

Calmthout journeys through the world of quantum mechanics and relativity in a coffee shop with two guests. The old man of physics Albert Einstein and the young upstart Niels Bohr. There is a little banter between the two giants of physics but mostly it's a bit of history and the future of physics. The cell phone plays a role in the discussion for several reasons besides computing. Secure communication and uncrackable encryption are two examples of quantum power. It’s fairly easy to tie physics to chemistry but Calmthout also ties it to biology and biological systems from migration to chloroplasts. The more that is understood about quantum mechanics the more that can be seen in our world and the more we can build upon the discoveries of the subatomic world.

Calmthout takes the reader on an exciting trip into the world of quantum mechanics. It is a place where “spooky interaction at a distance” is not so scary. It is a place that will make current microelectronics seem as clunky as an abacus. Real Quanta takes a look at the real world, its path, and possible future. Easily readable and very informative.

Quantum physics is never going to be an easy topic to cover, and this was hard going. Although I feel it did really try to lighten a weighty load, and the inclusion of Einstein and Bohr did help to split up the text when it started to get complicated.

The language used is simple enough, and the information is presented in layman terms - as much as you can get quantum physics in easy terminology. I think that's the real issue here. Quantum physics is grounded so much in theory, that it's rather difficult to grasp no matter how you present the data. And this comes from someone who works rather inadvertently within the field of quantum physics (via magnetic resonance imaging) and has spent a few years still trying to grasp some of the fundamentals.

I appreciate the authors efforts though. This is still one of the easiest reads I've read in regards to this topics and I applaud van Calmthout for his obvious enthusiasm on the subject.

I will admit to already being a hobbyist physics nerd on the quiet so I probably fall exactly within this books target audience. That being said, it’s no easy thing to present particle physics and quantum mechanics in language that is fresh, engaging and easily digestible for the layperson which I feel this book does. (Personally I have always found explaining a physics principle simply far more challenging than understanding the principle so I am full of admiration for the author.) I’m not sure this really taught me anything I didn’t know but it certainly sharpened and enhanced existing knowledge as well as being a fun and informative read. Anyone who has a reasonable interest in science will easily enjoy this.

This book was a disappointment to me, a dark body with little radiation. The first problem, I felt, was that the blurb completely misrepresents it. You can't blame the author for the blurb, unless the author self-publishes, but it's not the blurb that bothered me so much. Blurbs often misrepresent content. It's rather their job. What truly bothered me was the content itself, which was all over the place. There was a great teaching opportunity here, a chance to focus light on some potentially obscure subjects, but instead of a neat rainbow from a prism we got a scattering effect that failed to focus anything. The author is actually a science journalist, so this was doubly disappointing for me.

The conceit here is that the author, a Nederlander, is sitting down at a table in a fancy hotel in Brussels and discussing quantum physics with the German, Albert Einstein and the Dane, Neils Bohr, both of whom are dead. The problem with that is that neither Einstein nor Bohrs manage to get a word in edgewise; it's all Calmthout all the way down. And what he has to say was about as gripping an atom of a conducting material is on its electron shell.

According to the blurb, the book is supposed to be a discussion of "the state of quantum mechanics today" but it's far more of a history book than ever it is a modern electronics book, and the history, as I said, is terse and it bounces around so much that it makes it hard to get a clear picture of what was going on when. Unlike electrons which, when they jump, emit light, the text here typically failed to illuminate, hence my dark body allusion.

Additionally, there is a lot of repetition in the text, which is annoying. If this had been a first draft, I could have understood how it might end up like this, but this is supposed to be the publishable copy, or very close to it. In my opinion it needs a rewrite. And it needs properly formatting. This was obviously written with the print world in mind, without a single thought spared for the ebook version which is ironic given the subject matter! In my opinion, it should have been published only as an ebook.

The formatting was atrocious, with the titles of each chapter running into one word with no spacing, so they were unintelligible without some work to disentangle them. The drop-cap at the start of each chapter was predictably normal-sized because Amazon's crappy Kindle app cannot format for squat. Normal-sized, would have been fine had the drop-cap not been on the line above the rest of the text it was supposed to lead off. Also, quite often, when a term employing the indefinite article was employed, the 'a' was tacked onto the next word after it, which I suppose in one small way was an eloquent representation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

But back to the topic: the only way to have a conversation with Einstein or Bohrs is to read something they've written, or in the case of a book set up like this, to tread carefully and quote from them, using their published views as 'answers' to or explanations satisfying, your questions. The author didn't do this. Like I said, he seemed to feel that his own opinion was much more important than that of either of these two legendary and Nobel prize-winning historical figures!

He even puts words into my mouth so I shudder to imagine what he would have done to those two characters had he actually let them speak. For example, he says, "You instinctively wonder how on Earth an electron knows what is up and what is down. Aren’t those concepts a bit too human for a particle that shouldn’t really even be called a particle? That confusion is the core of the quantum mystery," but this is nonsensical, and do rest assured that I have never wondered how an electron knows what is up or down!

I can reveal to you here and now for the first time, that in the real world, electrons honestly don't give a damn. They are what they are. The fact that we project simplifying human 'explanations' onto them in an effort to understand their behavior doesn't mean the electrons care what we think! It's immaterial to an electron which way up it is. I know this because I interviewed a few for this blog and the truth is that electrons do not act alone! They're consummate team players - an example to us all!

The author doesn't seem to get this, and lets himself be dazzled by the reflection of our projections onto electrons, mistaking them for something real emanating from the electron itself! This same flaw is evident in the author's approach to the history of quantum physics: singling out great figures, but never successfully turning them into a refined-prose condensate. I wish this author all the best, but I fear we must await another author to get us a Grand Unified Theory of modern quantum mechanics - at least one that will energize the masses and give us the chain reaction we crave.

A big thank you to Martijn Van Calmthout, Dundern Press, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Well having had zero exposure to quantum physics I can now at least say I have a little understanding of the topic. But not much. I think it’s still a tricky topic to discuss. So much left to hypothesize. But what’s presented in this book is explained as well as it can be considering the subject matter. The author uses simple language and basic examples to explain convoluted principles. The presence of the two greatest scientific minds is entertaining and diverting just when I was getting overloaded.

Overall I enjoyed the book and what I gained from reading it.

This is an imaginative approach to making a subject which is not the easiest to present at least relatable for the average reader. I learned a bit from this book, but did have to reread some passages to ensure that I was correctly comprehending the science being explained. This book is not for everyone, but anyone with an at least moderate love of science and how different aspects of our lives actually function will have an appreciation for this book.

Quantum apps are all around us

One of the great things about quantum physics is that no one fully understands it, and if you think you do, it’s proof that you don’t. This had led to endless stories, explanations and variations of the same phenomena – all valid – all correct to a certain extent – and all different. In Real Quanta, Martijn Van Calmthout has his own pleasant way of explaining, including the use of a comic book, but mostly through the ruse of meeting Einstein and Bohr for an all-day junket at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, an old hangout of theirs. It is easy to read, enjoyable to read, and effectively communicates the intricacies. It helps that Calmthout is a quantum physicist himself, as well as a journalist. He has interviewed and worked with the great quantum physicists of our time and is up to the minute on it.

For me (having reviewed so many of these books), it is “simple” to understand. When electrons are part of a greater thing, they behave in the classic way we think of real objects. A 1963 Chevrolet Caprice convertible cannot be in two places at once, cannot be entangled with another such car on the other side of the galaxy, cannot pass through multiple points at the same instant, and cannot be the inverse complement to another Chevrolet Caprice. But a solitary electron, in what is called decoherence, has those properties. It loses them when it joins a greater effort (coherence), such as a molecule, a grain of sand, or the Crab Nebula. The rules change when you join up. Physicists have great difficulty rationalizing this, but in the last few decades they have begun to discover real world applications of it in plants, birds, and our own bodies, making it more acceptable to them.

We now know that plants are quantum users in their process of photosynthesis. They absorb sunlight and separate the electrons, which find out where they’re supposed to go by going in all directions at once. Just like the light experiments where an electron passes through both slits in the screen and hits the barrier behind it. Birds employ it inside their eyes to see magnetic fields. Our noses seem to employ it in deciphering scents. And our lungs use it extract electrons from air. It is thought that our brains use it to process thoughts and acts. There’s nothing strange about it. It’s our own prejudices from what we’re used to seeing and touching that make it seem bizarre.

We need to get over it.

David Wineberg