It’s been a couple of weeks since the last progress report, and Emmy is getting concerned.
So what’s the status of the book, anyway?
Introduction
Current Revision: 1
Total Words: 430 (dialogue only)
Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality
Current Revision: 5a
Total Words: 5,279
Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle
Current Revision: 7
Total Words: 4,499
Chapter 3: The Copenhagen Interpretation
Current Revision: 2
Total Words: 4,801
Chapter 4: The Many-Worlds Interpretation
Current Revision: 3
Total Words: 4,869
Chapter 5: The Quantum Zeno Effect
Current Revision: 2
Total Words: 3,263
Chapter 6: Quantum Tunneling
Current Revision: 4
Total Words: 4,426
Chapter 7: Entanglement
Current Revision: 3
Total Words: 6,343
Chapter 8: Quantum Teleportation
Current Revision: 0.5
Total Words: 3,566
Bonus Context-Free Dog Dialogue: “You’re pretty smart, but you’re no Einstein.”
“I’m, like, the canine Einstein, though, right?”
“Sure. As far as I know, you’re the Einstein of the dog world.”
The Tunneling chapter required a lot of revisions, but I eventually got it into a state where Kate agreed that it was comprehensible. Weirdly, she had very few comments on the Entanglement chapter, which either means that I’ve talked about this stuff so much that I’ve gotten really good at explaining it, or she’s heard it before, and can’t spot the glaring holes. Tough call, really.
The Entanglement chapter got really long, but it covers a lot of material: EPR, Bell’s theorem, a short aside about Bohmian mechanics, and the Aspect experiments testing Bell’s theorem. I don’t really see any way to cut any of that out, or spin it off into a separate chapter, but despite being almost 20% longer than any other chapter, I think it reads pretty well.
The Teleportation chapter is still in progress, though it’s mostly just missing some concluding and summing-up remarks. If you’re wondering about my earlier question, I went with a combination of the geometric analogy and Perry’s state-counting argument, and I think it works out all right. It’s really hard to explain in any kind of detail without algebra, though, so it’s a bit more hand-wavy than many of the other chapters. I’ll finish the first pass this week, and we’ll see how it looks then.
I doubt there’ll be much progress today, though, as we’re going out to get a Christmas treee, and then there’s football to watch…