Totally Random – Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (A Serious Comic on Entanglement) Paperback – Illustrated, 29 Jun. 2018

I've very much enjoyed the "seriousness" of the comic. When I LOL on a book on quantum entanglement at least twice per page, then, IMO, is a very good take on how to enlighten the masses and make science popular. Anyway as a programmer, my mind felt thankful for the "algorithmical" explanations and just loved the small eastereggs. I mean 1337? seriously? :) yea I'd totally recommend this book to anyone interested!

It's difficult to decide just where the problems start with Totally Random. It's an attempt to communicate the oddities of quantum entanglement using a comic book format. There has already been an attempt to do this for quantum theory in general - Mysteries of the Quantum Universe, which managed to both have a bit of a storyline and get in a fair amount of quantum physics. Unfortunately the format also got in the way - so much space was taken up by the pictures that the words simply didn't manage to get the message across. Doubly unfortunately, this is also true of Totally Random, with the added negatives that it has no discernible storyline and it's rarely even visually interesting.The attempt to explain entanglement suffers hugely because Tanya and Jeffrey Bub decided to use a set of analogies for quantum entanglement ('quoins', a kind of magic toaster device that entangles them, various strange devices to undertake other quantum operations) that don't so much help understand what's going on, as totally obscure what's supposed to be put across. It's a bit like trying to explain the rules of football using a box of kittens. It's far clearer if you get rid of the kittens and just explain the rules.Visually, the cartoon style varies considerably. There are quite a few pages that contain nothing more than a shaded background with a series of frames each having a line of text in it. It's just a dialogue where each character's words sit in a different frame - the comic format adds nothing to what is, often, a series of mutual insults, providing particularly 'you had to have been there' humour. My favourite parts of the visuals by a long way are the odd pages introducing a section where actual papers, such as the EPR paper are portrayed in realistic form. Those do look rather cool.Most of the key characters of the quantum story turn up in cartoon format. We meet Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Bohm, Einstein - plus one or two more tangential individuals such as Everett. There are a lot of 'insider jokes' in these sections, where, for example, Einstein produces in conversation many of his better lines on quantum theory from his letters to Max Born. Unfortunately, unless you know the topic already, these in-jokes will mean very little and produce strangely stilted dialogue.I think that summarises the real issue with Totally Random. It's very much an in-joke for insiders. It doesn't explain entanglement: to the general reader, it obscures it with a pile of baggage that you have to have been there to understand. And even then it can be hard work. I'm fairly confident in my understanding of entanglement - I have a physics degree and I've read lots about it - but there were pages here I struggled to follow.Sadly, the main feeling while reading Totally Random was tedium. With other graphic novel/comic presentations of non-fiction I've read, it has all been over far too quickly. Here I was thinking 'When will it end?' I was not inspired, but, rather, bored (or to sink to the level of the humour here, Bohred). It's a clever notion, but unfortunately the authors seem to be entirely the wrong people to make it work successfully.

To me the best point of "Totally random" is that it conveys all the major points of entanglement and its philosophical and practical consequences via the tossing of two coins. I don't think there is a simpler summary of the whole phenomena that manages to remain accurate anywhere else.The book first presents the two coins whose faces either match or don't depending on which way they are flipped. The matching of the faces is summarised in a nice 2x2 table. The manner in which the faces match seems to require them to be fixed in advance, but the comic then presents a nice argument that this cannot be the case. This matching of faces and the discussion of how they cannot be considered to arise from set up of the coins is the core of entanglement.Despite what other reviews state the incredibly strong correlations in the coins and the seeming inability to explain them is "all there is" to entanglement. Whether the correlations are conveyed via coin flips or polarization measurements doesn't really affect the main points. Coin flips are a better choice in my opinion because the details of polarizations and photons can lose people without a background in physics and they're not essential to the point. I think the dissatisfaction of another reviewer comes from thinking there is something beyond this that "Totally Random" fails to explain.The following section considers two other ways to get the coins to agree as they do. That those who flip the coin are being pre-programmed to flip them in such a way as to get them to obey the pattern. Or that the coins signal each other. Problems with both these approaches are then explained. One its sheer vastly conspiratorial nature and the second its tension with Relativity.This is where the first two parts of the book end. You've seen what entanglement is. A seemingly inexplicable matching pattern between two experiments, in this case flipping two coins. And this has been done without requiring any specialised knowledge of physics such as photon polarization or spin measurements.The third part of the book then goes into how the correlations found in the coins are not compatible with the results preexisting the flip of the coin, other attempts to get out confusion such as the Many Worlds Interpretation. It then leads into the orthodox (though often misunderstood) view of Neils Bohr that such correlations lack an account of how they come about. This is done in a nicely done argument between Neils Bohr and famous physicists who've tried to conceive of a dynamical story behind quantum theory that would tell you what is actually going on.The book closes out with a section on applications of entanglement using a casino game and teleportation.The graphic novel format lends itself very well to the initial discussion of the coin flips as it is very easily conveyed visually but might be belaboured in a pure text description. However to me it really shines in the sections with Schrödinger trying to imagine what the coins are like and Bohr's "clinic" for physicists trying to comprehend QM. Both are a good laugh and let you feel their frustration. Also the casino game at the end is precisely the sort of thing that is very easy to grasp visually but I've seen text descriptions of that game lose people.I strongly recommend this either for the general reader or an undergraduate.