Is there a good resource out there for laymen to explain "quantum stuff" in a meaningful way?
When I read articles that are using words like "spooky" and "weird" as terms of art, and using Schrödinger's cat as a way to clarify a topic, I get nothing out of it. And I'd like to be able to explain to my mom what this stuff is.
I read this book in high-school and learned about as much as I did in 4 undergrad physics courses about quantum mechanics.
There's no mathematics in this book, so it doesn't teach you how to calculate anything (for this, a physics degree helps), but the principles are presented very nicely.
I second that and after if you are keen it can be good to look at the Feynman Lectures vol III, Chapter 5 where he talks about spin. He deliberately leaves spin out of QED to keep things simple. Also if curious there's the Feynman lectures on Gravitation where he tries to figure out quantum gravity and fails like everyone else. One thing I like about Feynman is his talks are based on experiments - if you fire electrons at two slits this happens (QED) or if you send them past a magnet that happens (Ch 5). This is in contrast to most popular science books which go on about spooky cats or most academic treatments which launch into a bunch of abstract maths without looking that much at what's going on physically. I find it much easier to get my head around the real experiment approach.
† The Nature article characterises the Many-Worlds Interpretation like this:
"In the many-worlds picture, the wavefunction governs the evolution of reality so profoundly that whenever a quantum measurement is made, the Universe splits into parallel copies."
The first of the links above explains that this is a mischaracterisation.
It depends on what you mean by layman. I found the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson to be very easy to understand, but it does require some linear algebra and complex numbers. I don't think you can get a good overview of entanglement (where the madness lies) without that basic level.
It's very hard to ELI5 quantum mechanics. The only thing we can definitively constructively say is that we have a mathematical system that describes the universe very well at certain time/energy/distance scales. Trying to ascribe meaningfulness to this math is an ongoing struggle.
Aside, the terms "spooky" and "weird" are used to describe phenomena that "have no classical analogue." Physicists don't agree on what Schrödinger's cat means. I find that it muddles more than it clarifies.
In the early 20th century, math ordinarily used to describe waves was applied to very small systems of particles. This was both strange and extraordinarily successful at modeling systems (if only probabilistically). Applying physical meaning to the math has proven to be more or less intractable. Because the models are so successful in their domain, most physicists tend to brush aside ascribing meaning to the math.
There are a lot of examples in the book "In search of Schrodingers cat" which can be explained in layman terms. There's double slit experiment, then radioactive decay rate, then double polarization of light. That is what I can remember right now. But i remember, the book has lot many other examples.
When I read articles that are using words like "spooky" and "weird" as terms of art, and using Schrödinger's cat as a way to clarify a topic, I get nothing out of it. And I'd like to be able to explain to my mom what this stuff is.