How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog

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Maybe a dog person would find Chad Orzel’s attempts to talk quantum mechanics in the language of a pet and her owner more endearing. I thought you explained the physics well, and I liked your book for these explanations, but I found myself skipping over the animal-metaphors very early on.

When Quantum Physics expert Dr Chad Orzel went to adopt a dog he never imagined he would end up with one as inquisitive as Emmy. I've never read a popular physics book that didn't just skip over that part, and it made some of the concepts a lot easier to understand.He makes the point that dogs (and nonscientists) have an advantage in learning quantum physics because they have fewer preconceived notions of how the world works, so they can more easily accept some of the basic concepts. Orzel establishes a good foundation for the reader by developing the key ideas and establishing a basic vocabulary.

But if we thought of objects as abstract bundles of properties, we would find it easier to intuit the world of quantum dynamics. They also provide a nice frame to contrast the difference between the classical and quantum worlds, and explain why effects look so different when things get big. The first part of this weird expression is just a neologism for the expression 'property', and the second part refers to the philosophy of 'existence' (but, I would argue, the use of this expression is misleading, as the classical interpretation of ontology is exactly reversed in this new philosophy). I was less enamoured whenever he started talking about photons as waves and interference patterns … the way he was explaining it ended up confusing me and doubting my knowledge of quantum physics rather than honing it!

An infant would recognise the properties first: there's something bright, it is squishy to the touch, and it feels the same way whichever way I hold it. I really enjoyed the style and narration of this, turning such a complex subject into a fun and educational reading.

It's not useless for people like me who have a fair bit of physics background, but are not up on QED; and of course it's probably terrible if you're a graduate quantum physicist. We'll see how they compare - and whether repetition and a different way of presenting the weirdness continue to nudge me along a wee bit in my attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible.I am expressing thoughts that were triggered through my reading of his book, and I find these thoughts fascinating. Taking Emmy’s anarchic behaviour as a starting point, Orzel explains the key theories of quantum physics. If a particle can be in different positions at once, and lose its haecceity (the characteristics that define a thing as a particular thing, also known in philosophical literature by the funny expression "thisness"), then we are really not dealing with tiny billiard balls at all, are we? The study of quantum physics, combined with a conscious re-definition of how we perceive reality, may lead us again to the insight that a conscious intellect is the 'unverse observing itself', and even cross Wittgenstein's barrier that language is the final obstacle to reality. The amplitudes 'a(t)' of the states '|Stars>' are complex numbers normalised so that the sum of their squared moduli is unity (equals one).