As you can see from the photo above, Breakfast With Einstein is inching closer to reality– that’s a box of bound proofs sent to me by the US publisher. We’ve also got some blurb quotes from other authors:

“Common wisdom paints quantum mechanics as one of the most abstract and esoteric of subjects, daunting for non-experts. Yet, as Chad Orzel wonderfully shows in Breakfast with Einstein, a full gamut of our commonplace daily activities—from boiling water for tea on a glowing range to taking and exchanging photos with our electronic cameras and phones—depends on quantum rules. By focusing on how quantum mechanisms guide the workings of his typical morning routine, Orzel cleverly brings those important principles close to home.”

—Paul Halpern, author of The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality

and:

“Prof. Orzel draws us in with the everyday experience. And then we find we are on a journey of more than 100 years of physics. The reader is rewarded not only with a deeper understanding of everyday things, but also learns how physicists themselves look the world every day.”

—David Saltzberg, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA

(There are others in the works, but they haven’t been posted online yet…)

It is an enormous relief to be done with the editing process, and especially to see a generally positive response from the other physicists and writers who have read it for blurbing purposes. There’s nothing quite so nerve-wracking as sending a pop book off to other people who know at least as much about the subject as you do– if they came back and said “No, you explained this all wrong,” that would really ruin my day. Happily, that hasn’t happened so far.

So, now we’re in the part of the process where we wait for the final copies to be available– the production people are working their magic, and ink is being pressed into dead trees, and soon it will be a real book. The UK edition from Oneworld is showing an early-October release date, which I’m not fully confident is right; I’m more confident in the December 10 date for the US edition from BenBella.

(Crass business note: From the author’s perspective, online pre-orders and reviews are Very Good Things– pre-orders go down as first-week sales, which boost the book, and there is supposedly some threshold number of reviews for a book above which the Amazon algorithms make it more visible. If you’re planning to buy it online anyway, pre-ordering is great, and please do leave a review after you read it.)

Anyway, after a looong and arduous writing and editing process, the train at the end of the tunnel is coming into view. Expect a bunch more new-book-related content here as the official release date approaches…