Quantum Subversives. E. Cavalcanti in American Scientist 99:500 (2011).  What the paper says!?

This is a review by Cavalcanti of the book Coming of Age with Quantum Information by Christopher Fuchs where he publishes his private email correspondence, which «Fuchs began calling [...] his “samizdat”»

After his home in New Mexico burned down in May of 2000, he decided to begin gathering the correspondence with an eye toward publishing it on the preprint server arXiv.org, and a year later he posted more than 500 pages of messages there under the title Notes on a Paulian Idea: Foundational, Historical, Anecdotal and Forward-Looking Thoughts on the Quantum. (He used the fire as an excuse, saying, tongue in cheek, that he was taking this step as a way of backing up his hard drive.)

The way Cavalcanti sees it:

But above all, these incredibly interesting and often very personal letters, full of scholarship, excitement, enthusiasm and perplexity, are about a passionate young scientist’s attempts to come to grips with “the overwhelming message quantum theory is trying to tell us.”

His stance on where one stands as a QBist is interesting:

In contrast to the Soviet dissidents, Fuchs takes a philosophical position that is, among the plethora of interpretations of quantum theory, well aligned with mainstream thought—that is to say, well aligned with the operationalist philosophy defended by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Pauli, a view referred to as the “Copenhagen interpretation.” Indeed, Fuchs says that he is “concerned by the growing abandonment of standard (Copenhagen) quantum mechanics that I see all around me.”

Other interesting excerpts:

What makes Fuchs’s contribution unique is that he is one of the few who take the details of that philosophy very seriously and follow them to what seem to be their ultimate consequences.

One should not approach this book expecting a coherent treatise—it is the furthest thing from that. But in it readers will find a delightfully poetic vision for our world. Fuchs’s message is one of hope—hope that we will soon finally get to “the bottom of things,” and that when we do, we will find that “the world is so much more than a mechanical contraption clinking along,” and that “there is room for something new under the sun.”

Although some of Fuchs’s pronouncements must be taken with a grain of salt, the book is indeed a gem

Anyone under the impression that all questions about the foundations of quantum theory were settled long ago ought to take this unique opportunity to peek into the personal communications of some of the leaders in the field. They will find evidence that the debates about the fundamental nature of our world are very much alive—even if few have the courage, as Fuchs does, to bring them out in the open.