November 14, 2016
Walker, an inventor and retired physicist, joins a crowded field with his survey of quantum physics and its applications, offering a concise and “math-free,” yet dense and somewhat passionless, overview of such fields as cosmology, computer memory, and encryption. After delivering a promising and poetic image of humanity as “quantum beings” in a “quantum world,” Walker dives into a brisk review of the early history of quantum mechanics that covers the basics, including atomic structure, Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect, Bell’s theorem, and “instant action at a distance.” After this introduction, Walker covers a range of topics in a non-intuitive order. Quantum computing gives way to a lengthy chapter on “Galaxies, Black Holes, Gravity Waves, Matter, the Forces of Nature, the Higgs Boson, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and String Theory,” including a “Sightseeing Bus Tour Through the Universe,” an attempt at whimsy in a book that doesn’t feel at all comfortable with it. Arguments and explanations are largely made with passive sentences, giving the whole thing the feel of an old-fashioned textbook. Lucid but heavy, Walker’s book is most likely to excite engineers and other detail-oriented readers who already have a background in science.