Coming of Age with Quantum Information: Notes on a Paulian Idea. D. Greenberger in Am. J. Phys. 79:1083 (2011).  What the paper says!?

In this review of Christopher Fuchs's book Coming of Age with Quantum Information: Notes on a Paulian Idea, Daniel Greenberger makes a fantastic account of the value of correspondence:

Letters were once a very popular literary device and had a devoted readership, and many such epistolary books are fas cinating. One reads through the letters of a Nabokov, or a Kafka, for example, and they are as interesting as the novels and stories.

He is an exceptionally enthusiastic critics and makes a review that could hardly be more supportive:

The one sure thing that can be said about this book is that it is unique. There is really nothing like it out there.

And so, why is this book, clearly not for everyone, such a good read for some people? Because you continually come across passages that make you stop and say “Hmm, let me think about that!” And you put the book down and are soon lost in thought. What could possibly be better?

the main reason a physicist should read the book is that Fuchs is a very philosophically minded thinker

He attributes Quantum Information theory to Fredkin:

Quantum information theory started in Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli’s MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the late 1970s, and Richard Feynman’s early speculations on the subject.

The heros according to Greenberger:

The field has taken off quickly and has acquired its own first-generation heroes, a few of whom are John Wheeler, Rolf Landauer, Charlie Bennett, David Mermin, Asher Peres, and Bill Wootters.

On the (indeed mysterious) Paulian connection:

The phrase “Paulian Idea” in the subtitle is never fully defined, but one gets the feeling that Wolfgang Pauli thought that the objectivity of reality was defined by the idea that once an experiment was set up, the probabilistic outcome is determined independently of any observer. It’s a kind of reality, but a statistical one, clearly not a classical one.

Quantum information beside applied prospects:

The reason for the interest in quantum information, besides the practical one, is that it provides a new way to look at quantum theory and an opportunity to ask different kinds of questions about issues such as entropy and entangle ment.