The world of quantum theory is dizzying, dastardly and dazzling. Deep down (somewhere) in the subatomic realm lurk strange, elusive entities that, because physicists are trapped in language and logic, they have named “electrons,” “fields,” “waves,” “particles,” “atoms.” We don’t know what they look like, but we can see their paths, their “splats” on screens, where waves become particles, particles become waves, and particles interfere with themselves as if they were waves.

Louisa Gilder, who graduated from Dartmouth in 2000, has written a meticulous, splendid introduction to quantum theory, not by way of stark theoretical abstracts, which loom like splinters of ice in darkest isolation, but by way of the people who discovered the theories. She quotes Heisenberg: “Science rests on experiments, [but] is rooted in conversations.”

And what conversations! What daft, delicious, delirious personalities Gilder unearths as they wrestle and scrabble for the truth from the realistically-determined Einstein to the metaphysically-inclined Bohr, from young hotshot Heisenberg to querulous Wolfgang Pauli. Their intellectual combat, laced with humor and stealth, competition and connivings, is strewn with Nobel prizes and position papers.

Those who parade before us are as fascinating as their ideas: musicians, skiers, hikers, divers interact and battle. The Nazis chase many of them out of Germany. Families collapse; suicide ensues; many go into exile; many are hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s, labeled Communists and traitors. And overall hangs the threat of nuclear catastrophe as Einstein reveals the secret that matter and energy are interchangeable, that fission and fusion can be fashioned to blow up the planet.

John Bell is Gilder’s hero. He’s the one who discovered entanglement, the vision that any time two entities interact, they entangle and are forever entangled, no matter how far apart in the cosmos they are. Of course this raises more questions. Things have to be separate before they can entangle, don’t they? But there seem to be no separate waves or particles in the quantum world. They become these things when we measure them, but in the quantum state they seem to remain in a perpetual flux, annihilating each other, popping in and out of existence, colliding, careening and exploding.

Gilder, in clear, precise prose, captures all the mysterious entanglements of the quantum realm. Still, much is speculation, but Bell brought us closer. Experiments continue with the huge new accelerator-collider, CERN, just opened in Switzerland. It’ll fire particles at one another to see what appears: Black holes? New quarks? Revelation?

“We depend on our words,” Niels Bohr explained. “We are suspended in language.” Quantum theory eludes language, which is built on cause and effect, on logical grammar, which the quantum world eviscerates. This superb book lays out this magical territory and the wizards who occupy it. It is awesome.

samcoale@cox.net