(Los Angeles Review of Books) Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World by Prof. David Kaiser, MIT

Quantum Conversations, Entanglement, and the American Cold War “Physics Bubble”

By Michael D. Gordin

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

TRAINING TO BECOME a physicist is really hard work. I know because I’m not one. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I thought I might become a physicist but instead, early in college, I became captivated with the history of science and have never looked back. Well, almost never. My advisor in graduate school, out of what I am sure to him felt like benevolence but to me more like sadism, insisted that I keep enrolling in advanced courses in physics. As he put it in 1998: “In two years the physics of today will be last century’s physics, and you will want to be its historian.”

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