The shaky game : Einstein, realism, and the quantum theory

Einstein's disagreement with quantum mechanics is often presented in a disparaging manner - as if he had somehow lost the plot. In The Shaky Game Arthur Fine shows that this is an unfair characterisation. In the first half of this set of essays he looks in detail at Einstein's philosophical views, how they changed with time, and how they related to what other people thought. In particular he examines how Einstein's views are reflected in the EPR paper. It's worth reading if you want see why Einstein's position wasn't such a dead end as is often claimed.

Sometimes the book does suffer a bit from the fact that it's a set of essays written at separate times. For instance, early on Fine mentions some of his ideas called 'Prism Models'. I expected him to expand on these ideas in the second half of the book, where he gets on to presenting his own ideas on the subject. However, instead he describes his 'Natural Ontological Attitude' - a way of looking at the realism-antirealism dispute. I also found that this discussion was rather philosophical for my taste - if you like such philosophising then you're likely to find plenty to interest you, but I prefer things to be a bit more definite.