
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Entanglement-Quantum-Physics-Rebo...
> I also loved Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps. That one was slow for me, but it was like being in the kind of physics class I always dreamed of taking. At Harvard I had taken a class, Physics for Poets. The professor said in an impatient way, “If you can’t follow the math, then you don’t have to, but I can’t really explain it without the math, so just do the best you can.”
And this is true. You can't learn physics by listening to a physicist talk or by reading popular science books. The title of the article gave me the impression that the author picked up a university-level book in physics and worked through it. As far as reading popular science goes, I think a lot of SF authors do that. And there are also SF authors who dig deeply into the science they write about (e.g., Greg Egan, Peter Watts, etc.).
The history is fascinating. I'm waiting for a book that describes the deeper sociological aspect. A book with attitude. For instance, several of the founders of quantum physics had mystico-philosophical things to say about the quantum. But all of this was thrown out the window with the advent of the second world war. Physics became overrun by calculations. It took quite a while for people to get around to thinking about entanglement again. John Bell struggled for decades to get people to notice his work on this. Even the guy that invented the laser was met with stern disbelief when he presented his results to the "elders". Partly this is science just doing its thing, but there also does seem to be a history of science being dragged, kicking and screaming. Especially with quantum physics.
Funny enough, I had just gotten to the chapter on Schrödinger's derivation of his quantum equation in "The Age of Entanglement" by Louisa Gilder, a book whose style of historical scientific fiction reminds me of reading Asimov's Foundation series.