Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
Greg Egan is great. Strongly recommend Permutation City. Predating The Matrix, they build simulated worlds which then bootstrap themselves into alternate realities. The physics are not the same as our physics but similar.
He hit the popular science media as he was leading up to his modified delayed-choice quantum eraser for retro-causality. According to him that was a supposed paradox meaning the result of the experiment was going to have to give a result that conflicted with our theories and thus give an avenue for new discover (ie allow us to use a test that doesn't match our model).
It's been a decade and no results were ever discussed. That seems bizarre to me.
If anyone wants to learn more about Bell's inequality, the simplest (real, no bullshit) explanation I've ever seen is by David Griffiths. You can follow it if you know the basics of calculus:
The afterword seems kind of weak as it tries to return to the question of what quantum mechanics "means" and then... sort of doesn't really do that. It goes on to describe an "ethereal" influence distinct from causal influence, which is to say an "influence" that doesn't actually do anything at all. That's pretty disappointing.
The simplest explanation of what measurement actually is, in a quantum sense, is that it's the act of entangling your brain with whatever amplitude configuration represents the experiment we're interested in looking at. Basically the amplitude goes from looking like "brain * (result A + result B)" to "brain A * result A + brain B * result B". Brain A at that point can't communicate in any meaningful way with brain B because there isn't any causal relationship between the two anymore, so in a sense the brain has "split" and this is what we call decoherence. But for brain A to suppose that brain B has vanished in a puff of smoke, that is to say to privilege brain A over brain B, needlessly complicates the theory. It is the same as saying that since you can't see a thing anymore, it must not exist, and trying to build an entire physics based around what happens after you close your eyes.
I'll say that most of my physics classes lasted 2 years. 1 quarter in the class room and a year and a half before it really clicked. Wouldn't it be nice if you could retake classes again.
For a longer exposition that also covers the historical context more deeply, Jim Baggott's "The Meaning of Quantum Theory: A Guide For Students Of Chemistry and Physics" covers Bell's Theorem in Chapter 4 and also requires only basic knowledge of calculus.
I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying miss the point entirely. It's not about analysis, it's about communication. It's one thing for domain specialist to have a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of their specialty; extracting a relevant summary for non-experts is something else entirely. If you've ever been in a meeting where you had trouble getting your point across, you should read this. Make diagrams like Tufte does to get your point across, make more detailed ones as backups if you need to dive deep into details.
I think there is a tendancy to trivialise the difficulty of communication on large projects. I have had people tell me that "it is not rocket science". Well actually, maybe it is much harder than that. A small team can design a rocket engine. Getting a small team of managers to know all the right facts is very hard and on many projects seemingly impossible. And that is on projects where you can have very large margins of error. Obviously that is not always possible building things with strict mass limits.
The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church.
There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples.
In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.
... a very good book, by the way.