Review of "The Quantum World" by New Scientist

This has to be one of the worst guides to a subject I’ve read, possibly worse than Oxford’s Very Short Introductions (which are generally uniformly bad unless the author puts serious effort into editing the book him/her self). I would rate the relevant Very Short Introduction at three stars, if only because of the word limit and because of the coverage of less topics in a less hurried way. Luckily, the New Scientist book suggests other guides in the end I plan to read, including McEvoy’s Graphic Guide, Chad Orzel’s How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and Leonard Susskind’s Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum.

Rather unusually, the book actually gets better the more one reads it, only coherently describing the double slit experiment on page 158. The discussion of quantum gravity and the potential for quantum entanglement to be used for wormholes is also interesting, but, contrary to the book’s “Instant Expert” label is too superficial for any but the most ignorant readers. The book seems more like a series of magazine articles rather than a book.

Rating: two out of five stars