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QUANTUM REALITY:BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS One of the best-kept secrets of science--a veritable skeleton in thescience closet--is the fact that physicists have lost their grip on reality.Quantum theory is the most comprehensive and accurate theory known to man,describing nature at all scales from quark to quasar and forming the foundationfor numerous technologies including lasers, semiconductors and nuclear power.But the price physicists have paid for this powerful theory is the lossof an overall picture of how the world works. "Who could have imagined",Einstein once remarked about this reality crisis in physics, "thatwe would come to know so much yet understand so little?"
Quantum theory describes the world in terms of wave-like possibilities,when not observed; which change into (the so-called "collapse of thewavefunction") particle-like actualities (quanta) when looked at. Particleswhen you look; waves when you don't. What a strange way physicists haveof dealing with the ordinary world! And to make things worse not one ofus can tell you what it means to "look". "What is an observation?"is the biggest unsolved question in physics. The problem of observationlies at the the heart of the physicist's reality crisis.
"Quantum Reality" examines what "reality" means to aphysicist including case histories of a reality that failed (the luminiferousether) and a reality that succeeded (the atomicity of matter). Besides notbeing able to say what they mean by "observation", one furthersymptom of the reality crisis is the number of candidate realities proposedto explain the same quantum facts: all of these quantum realities are bizarreand none of them quite satisfactory.
"Quantum Reality" describes eight of these candidate realitiesranging from Hugh Everett's Many-Worlds Model thru Quantum Logic and UndividedWholeness to the No-Reality stance of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Nickevenhandedly examines the merits of these realities and some of their liabilities:since some of these realities contradict others, not all of them can betrue.
One of the key discoveries in the field of quantum reality was the proofby John Stewart Bell that the quantum world must be non-local--connectedby influences that are unmediated, unmitigated and immediate (faster-than-light).QR presents one of the clearest and most comprehensive discussions of Bell'sTheorem, its critics and how the faster-than-light nature of quantumtheory can co-exist with the slower-than-light requirements of Einstein'srelativity theory.
"Nothing exposes the perplexity at the heart of physics more starklythan certain preposterous-sounding claims a few outspoken physicists aremaking concerning how the world really works. If we take these clains atface value, the stories physicists tell resemble the tales of mystics andmadmen. Physicists are quick to reject such unsavory associations and insistthat they speak sober fact. We do not make these claims out of ignorance,they say, like ancient mapmakers filling in terra incognitas with plausiblegeography. Not ignorance, but the emergence of unsuspected knowledge forceson us all new visions of the way things really are." (QR p 16)
"In the case of Bell's proof, one can continue to believe in a localreality by denying one of Bell's assumptions. However because Bell's proofis so short and most of his assumptions accessible to experiment, such additionalsuppositions are not easy to find. Hence the various negations of Bell'sconclusion tend to be rather farfetched and lead to realities more preposterousthan the superluminal reality they attempt to exorcise." (QR p 234)
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