부산대학교 도서관

{\it Quantum teleportation. An ordinary miracle} is an interestingmixture of physics and biography. As the authors explain in theintroduction, they ``wanted to write a small review of quantumteleportation'', but discovered it impossible without going back tothe celebrated paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen: they ended uptelling the story of the origins of quantum mechanics and the debateson its interpretation. Only after covering this essential backgrounddo the authors present highlights of quantuminformation---teleportation, cryptography and computation.\par The ``historical'' part of the book may be of interest not just to theRussian-speaking audience. Even though all the sources are easilyavailable in English, the authors did a great job of putting togetheroriginal articles (much cited, but seldom read, as they comment)together with the memoirs of and the correspondence between theprotagonists of the ``heroic age'' of quantum mechanics. A gradualunfolding of the story reveals a complexity of this formativeprocess and also shows in a different light many of the concepts andmathematical objects we customarily employ. An easy-going style andsometimes witty, sometimes deep quotations at the beginning of eachchapter 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, severalupsetting features are too easily discernible. The breezy presentationsometimes slips into Mr-knows-the-truth insolent attitude towards thefounders, who too often were wrong. Superlatives are liberallydistributed. John Bell gets quite a vicious footnote; the onlyappellation ``great mathematician and physicist'' in the book goes toa Soviet physicist who is great enough to be in no need of thisdubious distinction. ``The number of publications that discuss the EPRproblem currently amounts to several millions''---running the ISIcitation database on the years 1988--2001 gave about 2000 papers. Whatis worse, sometimes the analysis of the arguments is replaced bypoking fun at the opponent (in analysis of the ensembles) or otherwriters (on the question of whether Heisenberg could have known matrixanalysis in 1925 or not).\par The physical part is more problematic. Modern quantum informationtheory is scarcely mentioned, while the authors steadfastly adhereto the thesis that everything is really contained in the book of vonNeumann. The absence of the Bell inequalities (together with theirexperimental verification and implications on the alternativetheories) from a book so heavily involved with EPR is at leaststrange. The authors' resolution of the EPR-Bohr discussion ``byaforementioned works (of von Neumann---my insertion) even beforeits 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) somewhatunwittingly ends up contradicting both the operationalstructure of quantum mechanics and some of quantum informationtheory. On the other hand, a short but clear exposition of theKochen-Specker theorem is one of the high points of the book.\par In general, the book may be recommended as a historical review ofthe early quantum mechanics and less recommended as anintroduction to quantum information theory.