This is a book review of LONG_Quantum Drama by John L. Heilbron.
Quantum Drama: From the Bohr--Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement, by Jim Baggott & John L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press), 2024. Pp. 346, 24.5 x 16.5 cm. Price £26.99 (hardbound, ISBN 978 0 19 284610 5).
Jim Baggott is known mainly as a writer of popular-science books; the late John L. Heilbron as a historian of science. Heilbron lived in Copenhagen 1962--1963, he interviewed many of the founders of quantum mechanics, and archived and microfilmed their correspondence; he has also written a biography of Bohr. They have teamed up for something in-between, a popular history-of-science book, more detailed than most popular-science books and a breezier read than most technical history-of-science monographs. It covers the time from the origins of quantum theory up to the present. Obviously, it can't be even close to a complete account in only a few hundred pages. Rather, as the subtitle states, it concentrates on the idea of entanglement, covering various interpretations of quantum mechanics, philosophical issues, experiments, and practical applications. Quantum mechanics is no longer just a system of rules for calculating experimental quantities, but has become a philosophical subject, with topics such as the measurement problem, the reality (or not) of macroscopic superpositions, the uncertainty relation, and so on occupying the best minds in the field, not always agreeing. The most famous such disagreements are the famous Bohr--Einstein debates. While there are few equations in the book, the fourth part goes into more detail than one might expect in explaining the ideas of Bell and the experiments of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger. While the book can't cover everything --- and doesn't attempt to --- all the same, many readers will probably come across concepts and people usually not mentioned in overviews of (the history of) quantum mechanics, such as Grete Hermann. As such, it is complementary to many other books broadly covering similar ground. It is also better written than most books I've reviewed in these pages.