Saturday, April 30, 2016

To Be Or Not To Be Is Not the Question

Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read this book several times -- first edition and second. It's not really hard to understand at all. The authors have a clear and to-the-point writing style--unusually entertaining for a non-fiction idea-oriented book of this sort. It is hard to accept. What it says is so disturbing to the prevailing world-view that I'm sure many people just shut it out by saying, "Oh this is too hard to understand." That means they've probably understood. Other readers may say, "This is all old-hat. Nothing new here -- it's boring." That's probably someone who doesn't understand what the book is saying. 

The quantum experiments are about as simple in principle as it's possible to be -- although some of them may require some awfully hi-tech equipment to conduct. So you don't need much if any math to understand this book. It's more about the implications of the experiments. What kind of world is this? Is it real? What does "real" mean? Do things have any separate existence? How can things that have no known physical connection still be connected -- even at vast distances -- in some weird mysterious way? How can things exist in different -- and even opposing -- states depending on how they are observed? How can the fact of being observed affect the values of the properties being measured?

I won't promise that you will find the answers to all these questions in this book. But I think you may learn more about what the questions are and how to ask them -- perhaps better than I have.  Knowing how to ask a question is, I believe, a large part of finding the answer.


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