Previews: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a book that explains quantum mechanics in terms that even a dog can understand-- in fact, the dog does some of the explaining.

You can download a PDF (627 kB) of Chapter 1, on wave-particle duality. This describes how we know that light is a particle (as well as a wave) and the electron is a wave (as well as a particle), and why Emmy can't use her wave nature to go around both sides of a tree at the same time.

You can also watch a dramatic reading of the dog conversation from Chapter 3, on Schrödinger's Cat and the Copenhagen Interpretation:

You can also watch a dramatic reading of the dog conversation from Chapter 5, on the quantum Zeno effect:

Finally, here's a video that's not strictly book-related, but Emmy does make a couple of appearances, and it does cover some material from the book: The Bohr-Einstein debates over the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, done with puppets. Dog puppets, because it's not easy to find a Niels Bohr puppet in the US:

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets from Chad Orzel on Vimeo.

More previews (other videos, etc.) will be posted here if and when they become available.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner can be ordered from Amazon.com, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, and Powell's.

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books and can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's.