Book Report

It's been a couple of weeks since the last progress report, and Emmy is getting concerned.

i-2f56954bad397478447ea0f411340169-sm_concerned.jpg

So what's the status of the book, anyway?

Introduction
Current Revision: 1

Total Words: 430 (dialogue only)

Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality

Current Revision: 5a

Total Words: 5,279

Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle

Current Revision: 7

Total Words: 4,499

Chapter 3: The Copenhagen Interpretation

Current Revision: 2

Total Words: 4,801

Chapter 4: The Many-Worlds Interpretation

Current Revision: 3

Total Words: 4,869

Chapter 5: The Quantum Zeno Effect

Current Revision: 2

Total Words: 3,263

Chapter 6: Quantum Tunneling

Current Revision: 4

Total Words: 4,426

Chapter 7: Entanglement

Current Revision: 3

Total Words: 6,343

Chapter 8: Quantum Teleportation

Current Revision: 0.5

Total Words: 3,566

Bonus Context-Free Dog Dialogue: "You're pretty smart, but you're no Einstein."

"I'm, like, the canine Einstein, though, right?"

"Sure. As far as I know, you're the Einstein of the dog world."

The Tunneling chapter required a lot of revisions, but I eventually got it into a state where Kate agreed that it was comprehensible. Weirdly, she had very few comments on the Entanglement chapter, which either means that I've talked about this stuff so much that I've gotten really good at explaining it, or she's heard it before, and can't spot the glaring holes. Tough call, really.

The Entanglement chapter got really long, but it covers a lot of material: EPR, Bell's theorem, a short aside about Bohmian mechanics, and the Aspect experiments testing Bell's theorem. I don't really see any way to cut any of that out, or spin it off into a separate chapter, but despite being almost 20% longer than any other chapter, I think it reads pretty well.

The Teleportation chapter is still in progress, though it's mostly just missing some concluding and summing-up remarks. If you're wondering about my earlier question, I went with a combination of the geometric analogy and Perry's state-counting argument, and I think it works out all right. It's really hard to explain in any kind of detail without algebra, though, so it's a bit more hand-wavy than many of the other chapters. I'll finish the first pass this week, and we'll see how it looks then.

I doubt there'll be much progress today, though, as we're going out to get a Christmas treee, and then there's football to watch...

More like this

"Hey, dude. What's in the binder?" "Well, it's the first draft of my book. I finished it this morning, and printed it out to have a paper copy to look at." "Ooooh! The book about me?" "Well, it's a book about physics, featuring you. But yes, that's the only book I'm working on at the moment." "…
It's been a while since I did one of these, so here's your book progress update for the last couple of weeks, with the obligatory dog picture. This is probably the halfway point for the first draft, more or less. Introduction Current Revision: 1 Total Words: 430 (dialogue only) Chapter 1: Particle-…
"Books? I like books!" Here's the next occasional book progress update: Introduction Current Revision: 1 Total Words: 422 (dialogue only) Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality Current Revision: 5a Total Words: 5,279 Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle Current Revision: 7 Total Words: 4,499 Chapter 3:…
The occasional writing update, with bonus LOLEmmy: (Photo credit: Kate) Introduction Current Revision: 1 Total Words: 422 (dialogue only) Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality Current Revision: 5a Total Words: 5,279 Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle Current Revision: 7 Total Words: 4,499 Chapter 3:…

Hi, I'm a new reader so apologies if this has been answered before. How many chapters is your book going to be, roughly? Is this the meat of it, or are there more sections yet to be written, and if so, what other topics do you want to cover?

How many chapters is your book going to be, roughly? Is this the meat of it, or are there more sections yet to be written, and if so, what other topics do you want to cover?

There are three more chapters in the outline I drew up for myself a while back, covering extra dimensions, virtual particles/ Feynman diagrams, and quantum chicanery (Deepak Chopra type quantum woo, free energy schemes, etc.). I'm going to be way over the word count (it's currently about 37,000 words, the contract calls for 40,000), but that's what editing is all about.

Why does your dog always look like her dog just died?

It's extremely difficult to be her...

Those are just the easiest pictures to get. When she's really happy and excited, she doesn't hold still long enough to get a really good picture.

That's about as much as her ears ever stand up. She's got purebred German Shepherd coloring, but she's a cross between a Shepherd and something small and floppy-eared-- she's only about 50 pounds, which is small for a Sherpherd, and her ears never stand all the way up.

You know I really do look forward to this book being finished, edited, revised, edited (you know what I mean) printed and distributed so I can get a copy.

Especially since it has the dog.

You've definitely got much more completed than I have on my own project, partly due to time constraints and partly because my cats can't resist trying to walk over my keyboard whenever I sit down to write. My goal is to get a first draft done by the time I turn 25 in February, but I'm starting to have doubts about whether I will be able to meet my goal.