The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon, by Brian Clegg.

Anton Chekhov once said that if you say in the first chapter of your book that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. In other words, if the gun is not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging prominently on the wall.

With that in mind, I looked forward to the author’s discussion of how quantum entanglement could be seen as evidence of an invisible space deity, and was seriously disappointed that he dedicated but a single sentence to the topic, saying in the preface that entanglement is “a physical phenomenon so strange and all pervasive that this book calls it “the God Effect.””

I found his use of the third person here quite odd. Why does “the book” call entanglement “the God Effect?” Did the book write itself? What does the author think? We never find out, and I suspect that the word was added to the title to be sensationalistic.

Much of the rest of the book was similarly unsatisfying. Some parts were clever and thorough and I was fascinated to learn that mirrors do not really “reflect” photons of light. Rather, each time a photon of light hits the surface of a mirror it is absorbed by an electron. Nearly instantaneously, the electron make a quantum leap to a higher energy state where it becomes unstable and emits a new (different) photon of light to stabilize itself.

That said, I got the feeling that the book was dictated to a research assistant while the author sat before a fireplace with a glass of wine: Many of the chapters started on one topic and then devolved into anecdotes or historical explanations only tangentially related to the concept at hand.

Other ideas were explained in a way that I can only describe as lazy in their reasoning. One example concerns the concept of whether light is a wave or particle, and the concept of superposition, which says that photons fly through the air not as a single particles but rather as a clouds of possibility that coalesce into physical states only when they are forced to, by third-party observation/interaction.

The author describes an experiment in which 45-degree-polarized photons are fired through three slots in different orientations and claims that the fact of some particles getting through the obstacle course proves the concept of superposition.

He may be right that superposition is why it happens but his explanation is incomplete at best. The way he describes the experiment, the answer to what happens could be as simple as “anytime a photon goes through a slot it become oriented such that it can only go through another slot oriented within 45 degrees of the previous slot.”

To make my point let’s imagine high speed racecars instead of photons going 200 mph traveling north through a pair of cones and then trying to make a quick 90 degree turn. They are unable to do it because they are going too fast. Then, we change the 90 degree turn into two 45 degree angle turns, spaced out. Does the fact that some cars are now able to make those two turns mean that they entered a superposition and were simultaneously heading north and east? No, of course not.

The point here is not that the experiment was wrong (I’ve read much better descriptions of this experiment and I’m grudgingly willing to accept its conclusion) but rather that the author does a poor job of explaining how he (or anyone) knows that probabilities in quantum physics are real.

Also frustrating is the fact that the author give no effort to explaining what he (or anyone) thinks is the actual, factual, physical cause of quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance. How can someone write a book called “Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon” and not discuss the how and why of two particles being separated by great distance, impacting each other simultaneously, seemingly faster than the speed of light?

My layman’s research into this topic is in its infancy, but even I have my wild guesses about what is going on with entanglement (more on that in another post). Unfortunately, this author was more interested in telling stories of the CERN laboratory, the history of the telegraph and typewriter, and explaining how entanglement impacts cryptography than he was in diving in to the meat of how spooky action at a distance works.

In the end I don’t recommend this book to anyone, other than perhaps to those seriously into cryptography. “The God Particle” isn’t a good first introduction to the concept of quantum entanglement and it isn’t a book that dives deeper into any particular concepts. It rants and rambles and tries to mesmerize but in the end failed to interest, intrigue or inspire me much at all, other than to look for more and better books on the subject.