부산대학교 도서관

{\it Quantum teleportation. An ordinary miracle} is an interesting mixture of physics and biography. As the authors explain in the introduction, they ``wanted to write a small review of quantum teleportation'', but discovered it impossible without going back to the celebrated paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen: they ended up telling the story of the origins of quantum mechanics and the debates on its interpretation. Only after covering this essential background do the authors present highlights of quantum information---teleportation, cryptography and computation. \par The ``historical'' part of the book may be of interest not just to the Russian-speaking audience. Even though all the sources are easily available in English, the authors did a great job of putting together original articles (much cited, but seldom read, as they comment) together with the memoirs of and the correspondence between the protagonists of the ``heroic age'' of quantum mechanics. A gradual unfolding of the story reveals a complexity of this formative process and also shows in a different light many of the concepts and mathematical objects we customarily employ. An easy-going style and sometimes witty, sometimes deep quotations at the beginning of each chapter make this book an enjoyable read. \par It is obvious that any presentation of history and background physics, especially in limited space, cannot be perfect. However, several upsetting features are too easily discernible. The breezy presentation sometimes slips into Mr-knows-the-truth insolent attitude towards the founders, who too often were wrong. Superlatives are liberally distributed. John Bell gets quite a vicious footnote; the only appellation ``great mathematician and physicist'' in the book goes to a Soviet physicist who is great enough to be in no need of this dubious distinction. ``The number of publications that discuss the EPR problem currently amounts to several millions''---running the ISI citation database on the years 1988--2001 gave about 2000 papers. What is worse, sometimes the analysis of the arguments is replaced by poking fun at the opponent (in analysis of the ensembles) or other writers (on the question of whether Heisenberg could have known matrix analysis in 1925 or not). \par The physical part is more problematic. Modern quantum information theory is scarcely mentioned, while the authors steadfastly adhere to the thesis that everything is really contained in the book of von Neumann. The absence of the Bell inequalities (together with their experimental verification and implications on the alternative theories) from a book so heavily involved with EPR is at least strange. The authors' resolution of the EPR-Bohr discussion ``by aforementioned works (of von Neumann---my insertion) even before its beginning'' only clarifies the structure of the quantum theory, but does not resolve the conflict, contrary to the authors' claim. The discourse on quantum ensembles (pp.\ 167--180) somewhat unwittingly ends up contradicting both the operational structure of quantum mechanics and some of quantum information theory. On the other hand, a short but clear exposition of the Kochen-Specker theorem is one of the high points of the book. \par In general, the book may be recommended as a historical review of the early quantum mechanics and less recommended as an introduction to quantum information theory.