Acknowledgments

I learned about the physics described in this book from a large number of mentors and colleagues over a period of almost twenty years. Many thanks are due to Bill Phillips, Steve Rolston, Paul Lett, Kris Helmerson, Ivan Deutsch, Aephraim Steinberg, Luis Orozco, Paul Kwiat, Mark Kasevich, Dave DeMille, Seyffie Maleki, Kevin Jones, Jeff Strait, Stuart Crampton, and Bill Wootters. All the good parts of the explanations are ultimately due to them; any mistakes are original to me.

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I got many helpful comments on an early draft of this book from my intrepid beta readers: Jane Acheson, Lisa Bao, Aaron Bergman, Sean Carroll, Yoon Ha Lee, Matt McIrvin, and Frances Moffet. Michael Nielsen and David Kaiser also made helpful comments on draft copies. All of them helped make this a better book than it would’ve been otherwise.

This book grew out of a couple of posts on my weblog, “Uncertain Principles” (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/), which eventually became the opening dialogues of chapters 4 and 9. Thanks are due to the folks at Science-Blogs—Christopher Mims, Katherine Sharpe, Erin Johnson, and Arikia Millikan—for providing me with a platform, and to Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and the people at Digg for promoting those posts. Barrett Garese, Erin Hosier, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden deserve thanks for convincing me that writing a physics book with my dog was a good idea. And of course, thanks to my editor, Beth Wareham, and agent, Erin Hosier, for all their help getting the book into shape, and helping me navigate the publishing process, which is completely different than anything in physics.

Emmy was adopted from the Mohawk & Hudson River Humane Society shelter in Menands, New York (http://www.mohawkhumanesociety.org/). Like most animal shelters, they are an excellent source of wonderful dogs (and other pets), and I would encourage anyone thinking of getting a dog to look at their local shelter.

I’ve been lucky enough to know a lot of dogs over the years—Patches, Rory, Truman, the late great RD, Bodie, and even Tinker—and there’s a little bit of all of them in this book. Most of the credit goes to Emmy, though, who is unquestionably the best Emmy ever, and the Queen of Niskayuna.

Many thanks are due to my friends and family, who have been tremendously supportive despite finding the whole thing a little weird. And last, but far from least, thanks to my wife, Kate Nepveu, for reading innumerable drafts and gently correcting my grammar; for patiently listening to me rant and kick ideas around; and for baby Claire, who complicated things in the best way possible, and most of all for inspiring the whole thing by laughing when I have silly conversations with the dog. This quite literally would not have happened without her.