I doubt Tim Maudlin’s (2011) explanation of Bell’s theorem is the best available.
Skimming his chapter, I was troubled by his incorrect assertion that the GHZ state hasn’t been experimentally demonstrated(!?). This is the kind of error you should only witness if a book was published back when that was true (in the 1990s) or if the author was an aging professor who was divorced from the experimental physics literature for the past ten years. Maudlin’s effort is the latter.
If you want to learn quantum physics, I recommend skipping all textbooks written by career physics professors. Go straight to: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. They are experimentalists who actually needed to build quantum computers… so they had to write their textbook to make sense since most quantum physics texts are variously incomprensible and/or wrong. As with most fields, quantum physics textbooks only got good once there was a terminal application beyond “teaching”.
You’re right about the GHZ thing. The first edition of the book was published in 1994 and it looks like the appendix on the GHZ state hasn’t been updated since then.
But this oversight has little bearing on Maudlin’s explanation of Bell’s theorem, which is, after all, a purely theoretical result. It’s an excellent explanation, sophisticated but also accessible. Nielsen and Chuang is a great textbook, but it clearly does not meet the criteria laid out by Luke. A layperson could not just pick up their discussion of Bell states and understand it.
I doubt Tim Maudlin’s (2011) explanation of Bell’s theorem is the best available.
Skimming his chapter, I was troubled by his incorrect assertion that the GHZ state hasn’t been experimentally demonstrated(!?). This is the kind of error you should only witness if a book was published back when that was true (in the 1990s) or if the author was an aging professor who was divorced from the experimental physics literature for the past ten years. Maudlin’s effort is the latter.
See:
2000: First experimental demonstration of GHZ state (with photons)
2010: More recent experiment (with fully characterized, physical qubits)
If you want to learn quantum physics, I recommend skipping all textbooks written by career physics professors. Go straight to: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. They are experimentalists who actually needed to build quantum computers… so they had to write their textbook to make sense since most quantum physics texts are variously incomprensible and/or wrong. As with most fields, quantum physics textbooks only got good once there was a terminal application beyond “teaching”.
You’re right about the GHZ thing. The first edition of the book was published in 1994 and it looks like the appendix on the GHZ state hasn’t been updated since then.
But this oversight has little bearing on Maudlin’s explanation of Bell’s theorem, which is, after all, a purely theoretical result. It’s an excellent explanation, sophisticated but also accessible. Nielsen and Chuang is a great textbook, but it clearly does not meet the criteria laid out by Luke. A layperson could not just pick up their discussion of Bell states and understand it.