This is an audiobook version of this book.

Quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and even quantum AI—a century after the discovery of an unexpected physical world, researchers are putting this puzzling science to work in dazzling new ways.

In this exhilarating and mind-bending book, renowned scientist and author Paul Davies offers readers a glimpse of how quantum physics has led to a quantum technology revolution. Quantum 2.0 reveals how today’s brightest minds are harnessing exotic states of matter that have no counterpart in everyday life. Specifically, all eyes are on entanglement, called “spooky” by Einstein, which links the activities of separated particles even across vast distances.

By manipulating these weird properties of atoms, electrons, and photons, scientists are driving the burgeoning field of “quantum information science,” featuring new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and the quantum internet. In turn, their efforts have attracted billions of dollars in investments and triggered a frantic quantum arms race between nations. At the same time, theorists are taking a closer look at quantum systems themselves, which possess properties that defy intuition and shred everyday notions of reality. Davies explains how researchers, including himself, are wrestling with quantum theory to make sense of this realm, where ghostly quantum particles produce tiny forces in nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate, and may even contribute to the universe’s accelerating expansion. A trusted guide, Davies takes readers from the basic concepts to today’s cutting edge, inviting us all to glimpse the wonderland of quantum physics and its stunning implications.

Quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and even quantum AI—a century after the discovery of an unexpected physical world, researchers are putting this puzzling science to work in dazzling new ways.

In this exhilarating and mind-bending book, renowned scientist and author Paul Davies offers readers a glimpse of how quantum physics has led to a quantum technology revolution. Quantum 2.0 reveals how today’s brightest minds are harnessing exotic states of matter that have no counterpart in everyday life. Specifically, all eyes are on entanglement, called “spooky” by Einstein, which links the activities of separated particles even across vast distances.

By manipulating these weird properties of atoms, electrons, and photons, scientists are driving the burgeoning field of “quantum information science,” featuring new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and the quantum internet. In turn, their efforts have attracted billions of dollars in investments and triggered a frantic quantum arms race between nations. At the same time, theorists are taking a closer look at quantum systems themselves, which possess properties that defy intuition and shred everyday notions of reality. Davies explains how researchers, including himself, are wrestling with quantum theory to make sense of this realm, where ghostly quantum particles produce tiny forces in nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate, and may even contribute to the universe’s accelerating expansion. A trusted guide, Davies takes readers from the basic concepts to today’s cutting edge, inviting us all to glimpse the wonderland of quantum physics and its stunning implications.

In 1953, reflecting on early ventures in quantum theory, J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke of terror and exaltation, of history happening in a realm so remote from common experience that it was “unlikely to be known to any poet or historian.” Yet now, anyone can Google “quantum theory” and find more than 34 million entries—from poets and historians, certainly, as well as film critics and Buddhist monks. How—and how pervasively—quantum mechanics has entered the general culture is the subject of this book, an engaging, eclectic, and thought-provoking look at the curious, boundlessly fertile intersection of scientific thought and everyday life.

Including recollections of encounters with the theory and the people responsible for it, Jeremy Bernstein’s account ranges from the cross-pollination of quantum mechanics with Marxist ideology and Christian and Buddhist mysticism to its influence on theater, film, and fiction. Along the way, Bernstein focuses on those—such as Niels Bohr, the Dalai Lama, W. H. Auden, and Tom Stoppard—who have made quantum physics; who have argued over it, pondered it, or taken literary inspiration from it, and who have misunderstood, misconstrued, or misapplied it. One person in particular supplies a narrative thread: John Bell, a notable yet underappreciated physicist who did groundbreaking research in quantum physics. In Bell’s story, Bernstein provides a uniquely readable account of what physicists call the “measurement problem.”

Quantum Leaps is a lively, erudite book on a subject that Bernstein has lived with for most of its history. His experience and deep understanding are apparent on every page.

This text, the Questions concerning Aristotle's On Animals [Quaestiones super de animalibus], recovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century and never before translated in its entirety, represents Conrad of Austria's report on a series of disputed questions that Albert the Great addressed in Cologne ca. 1258.