If there was ever a book that screamed I should read it – this is the one. 

Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics

I just finished it and I’ll even recommend it, but…

There are so many thoughts jumbled up in my head. It’s hard to separate them all out.

• OK this entire book sounds like a discussion that we would’ve had at the bar while I was in graduate school.  The physics department at the University of Connecticut is right next to a bar called Ted’s.  It’s a dive bar and still open from what I could tell.  At the end of a long day of doing physics, my colleagues/friends/peers/etc and I would walk over to the bar and have a couple of drinks (and some unbelievablely good subs).  We would yap all night about quantum mechanics, the meaning of life, the fifth force, how we could solve all of the social problems of the world with differential equations, etc, etc.  I don’t know why, but this book just took me back to that place.
• There were at least three times in this book where I laughed out loud and needed a couple of minutes to recover because I was laughing so hard. This dude is pretty funny. But also Is this the feeling that I feel other physicists get when they read my stuff? The humor sometimes just doesn’t come off right.
• The physics was definitely well thought out.  It was awesome!
• The Author uses the F word a lot in this book. I mean a lot.  So just thinking about this as a fellow author, was all of that necessary. It definitely helped the book move along, but also might isolate some members of the general audience. By the way, the audience that appreciates the F bomb in a physics book is me.  I swear way too much.  I literally give my students a middle finger as a joke when teaching them the right hand rule.  That being said, it’s also one of the criticisms that I run across a lot. If using the F bomb makes something PG-13, could you enhance your audience by making a PG?  I don’t know the answer to this.
• I am definitely in the shut up and calculate camp. It’s funny that he calls it F off camp.  I kinda like that better.
• At the end of the book he hints that the entire book was really about teaching the audience physics and he used debunking quantum bullshit as a vehicle to get people into the book. That’s really interesting. I wish I would’ve thought about that.
• I’m really ashamed to admit that I haven’t read Chad Orzel‘s How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog yet.  That seems like that would be a goto for the general audience and quantum physics.  But this book was good too.
• One of the things that this author does so well is discussing a physics idea, giving you a little sense of the science, then giving a little sense of the engineering figuring out how it’s practical.  But not dwelling on it too much. So the reader isn’t really bored. Of course, as a scientist who studies these things I’m jumping up and down, wanting to hear the next little bit. But the average reader is not, and this author does a really good job of changing up the topics to keep the reader engaged. Therefore, I recommended.

I don’t agree with this statement – in quantum physics objects are mathematically described by adding fractions of classical states together.  The states themselves are quantum. For example, the harmonic oscillator has a probability beyond the turning points, which is not allowed in classical physics. (Did I mention this book took be back to arguing about physics in the bar…)