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PHYSICS Quantum Subversives COMING OF AGE WITH QUANTUM INFORMATION: Notes on a Paulian Idea. Christopher A. Fuchs. Ivi + 543 pp. Cambridge University Press, 2011. $70.
In the post-Stalin Soviet Union, dissidents used underground networks to distribute censored material. This activity, which was called samizdat (which translates to "selfpublished"), put its practitioners at grave risk of harsh punishment. For scientists today, making public one's philosophical ideas is not nearly so risky but nevertheless requires substantial courage. That is what Christopher A. Fuchs, a Senior Researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Canada, began to do in his correspondence with friends and colleagues in 1995, inspired by an encounter with two books that impressed him deeply: Wolfgang Pauli's Writings on Physics and Philosophy, and K. V. Laurikainen's Beyond the Atom: The Philosophical Thought of Wolfgang Pauli. As his correspondence about the ideas these books inspired in him grew, Fuchs began calling the collection of e-mail messages his "samizdat" and started distributing chunks of it to new correspondents. After his home in New Mexico burned down in May of 2000, he decided to begin gathering the correspondence with an eye toward publishing it on the preprint server arXiv.org, and a year later he posted more than 500 pages of messages there under the title Notes on a Paulian Idea: Foundational, Historical, Anecdotal and Forward-Looking Thoughts on the Quantum. (He used the fire as an excuse, saying, tongue in cheek, that he was taking this step as a way of backing up his hard drive.) These e-mails written between 1995 and 2001, grouped by correspondent, are now available in book form as Coming of Age with Quantum Information.
Among the "subversives" who were, knowingly or not, dragged into Fuchs's samizdat by corresponding with him are some of the leading scientists in the field of quantum information theory - people such as Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Carlton Caves, Rolf Landauer, David Mermin, Asher Peres, John Preskill, Abner Shimony, Bill Wootters and Anton Zeilinger. The conversations they had with Fuchs were often about technical aspects of their field, which aims to harness the power of quantum mechanics to create new technologies for cryptography, teleportation and computation. But above all, these incredibly interesting and often very personal letters,...