Betteridge's law states when the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is always "No." Applying that to this book, nothing is real and nothing to get hung about. The subtitle admits that searching for the real is an unfinished quest but implies it is finishable. Indeed, our view of science is that its goal is to get to the bottom of things and is the only way to do so we have.

Full disclosure: I side with J. B. S. Haldane and against David Deutch, both of whom show up in this book that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." But I'm also a human and would like to know what is real. More disclosure: I don't think science will tell us, at least the science we have now, because I don't believe a view from nowhere will come up with a view compatible with a view from my perspective.

I'll explain a little so you don't think I'm one of those Continental philosophers that Steven Hawking and Neil DeGrasse Tyson declared irrelevant. I see science, like cartography, as providing maps and all maps leave some things out. You wouldn't use, say, a subway map to measure the distance between two points. As such, I'm fine with the Copenhagen interpretation that Adam Becker clearly dislikes. He never comes out and says so but I believe he sides with David Albert whom he quotes as calling Copenhagen "gibberish." (More disclosure: I also like Copenhagen's TV shows like Borgen and Forbrydelsen.) My background is in mathematics and I understand the concept of isomorphism which allows complementary descriptions for the same underlying systems. As for "shut up and calculate," I don't require the "shut up" part because, as a sometime teacher, I appreciate the need for good explanations. I'll talk more about good explanations when I review David Deutsch later on.

Adam Becker provides lots of explanations. His "Bell's Theorem" description was among the clearest I'd seen. And his historic approach was enlightening, exposing the political and economic underpinnings of what gets studied and which explanations prevail in a subject that is supposed to only be seeking truth. Also, I somehow hadn't been aware before that Heisenberg was a Nazi. I wonder if that entered into Walter White's borrowing his name.

Adam Becker is comes right out and says that Science is mired in the political, but like a good physicist, hopes this can be minimized in practice. He cites the creationists and climate change deniers as being unable or unwilling to make that effort but he forgets that physicist Freeman Dyson (who also appears in this book) thinks much of the climate science is flawed and that too much is being made of global warming.

All in all, this book is a good approach for novices to the cross between philosophy and quantum physics and I enjoyed reading it.