In 1989, the year before he died, John Bell gave the "speech of his career" to his fellow physicists, taking issue with the standard interpretation of quantum physics: "It would seem that the theory is exclusively concerned about 'results of measurement' and has nothing to say about anything else. What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of 'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system...with a Ph.D.? If the theory is to apply to anything but highly idealized laboratory operations, are we not obliged to admit that more or less 'measurement-like' processes are going on more or less all the time, more or less everywhere?"

In The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder presents us with quantum physics not as a textbook abstraction, but as a vigorous debate among brilliant men and women trying to make sense of the most baffling of mysteries. Gilder has performed a great service by assembling a vast collection of letters, conversations, speeches and anecdotes to tell this story in a fascinating way. Over many years of contentious theorizing and difficult experimentation, physicists came to grips with the implications of quantum mechanics: either little things are not fully real until they are observed by big things like us (the view attacked by Bell); or maybe they are real in some mysterious way, entangled in a hidden web of nonlocal connections. Quantum physics challenges the traditional scientific view of a world consisting of separate, independently existing objects exerting forces on one another from point to point to point in space.

I suggest that readers without a lot of familiarity with quantum physics have handy a book which explains the physics a little more clearly, such as Rosenblum and Kuttner's Quantum Enigma. The strength of Gilder's book is less in its explanations than its storytelling. For that, it is a great read.