Reality is not our paradigm's strong suit, but this short tome, written a few years after ‘The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’, reminds us that the meaning of life, the universe, and sundry phenomena was a hot topic back then. It was also the period of my own physics studies, so I can vouch for the ample cross-referencing bouncing around in students’ escape pods, attesting to the subject’s coming out into the popular media, frustrated by the incurably reclusive trajectory of traditional academia’s output.

This is a book with ambiguous intentions. Was it seriously designed for the popularisation market, as its jacket cover suggests? It does nothing much to augment its appeal by amateurishly hand-drawn diagrams, admittedly with some not unsuccessful attempts at humour, representing such delectables as the eight perceived possible quantum states. It does, however, indirectly suggest some contextual handles with which to position its hypothesis in the stampede of 60's and 70's reappraisals of the Bohr-Einstein stand-off. Whereas it enters the lay engagement with commendable enthusiasm, initially boldly claiming not to assume any prior knowledge of Quantum Mechanics, it quickly lapses into the safe-zone of equations to guard-dog its terrain from the too casual interloper, leaving us yearning for the quiet reassurance of a Carl Sagan, or the friendly engagement of a Michu Kaku.

As a New York Times commenter reports, this book brings you to the point of ‘almosting it’, which is as much as any of us can really aspire to do in this confounding quagmire of theory and regularly reinstated confusion.

Only for the resolute-hearted, but a book which could help you tie Bell to String.