Who's Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat? An A-to-Z Guide to All the New Science Ideas You Need to Keep Up with the New Thinking [Paperback]

Ian Marshall (Author), Danah Zohar (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0688161073 | ISBN-13: 978-0688161071 | Publication Date: June 17, 1998

Quantum theorist Erwin Schrvdinger invented his now-famous cat to illustrate the apparently impossible conundrums associated with quantum physics. The cat lives in an opaque box with a fiendish device that randomly feeds it either food, allowing it to live, or poison, which kills it. But in the quantum world, all possibilities coexist and have a reality of their own, and they ensure that the cat is both alive and dead, simultaneously.

Who's Afraid of Schrvdinger's Cat? is a clear, concise explanation of the new sciences of quantum mechanics, chaos and complexity theory, relativity, new theories of mind, and the new cosmology. It studies worlds beyond the realm of common sense, and the new kinds of thinking that we need to understand ourselves, our minds, and our human place in the larger scheme of things.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Quantum physics does not sit lightly on the brain. In fact, Schrödinger's cat, a feline in an opaque box who's paradoxically both dead and alive, was created by Erwin Schrödinger to help people conceptualize the quantum possibilities of both/and, instead of the more common either/or. Still, the new science doesn't find an easy mental perch. Ergo, the need for, and elegant achievement of, this book.

The main text is made up of short essays on specific ideas, forming an encyclopedia of the new sciences, but the book starts off with four clear and engaging overview essays. "Kinds of Being" introduces ancient, classical, and quantum physics, followed by "Order in Science and Thought," which surveys ideas of complexity, such as chaos, evolution, and games theory. "The New Sciences of the Mind" is next, attempting to answer questions like "What is a mind? What is awareness? Must a mind, to be a mind, be conscious?" and "The Cosmic Canopy" is the last of the introductory essays, dealing with high-energy phenomena in cosmology and particle physics. Once you've chewed these chapters over, you're ready to access the nearly 200 specific questions and concepts in the A-to-Z, which makes up the bulk of the book, starting with Absolute Zero and wending its way through Entropy, Lamarckism, and Planck's Constant, Quantum Gravity, Reductionism, and Supersymmetry to Wormholes and Wrinkles in the Microwave.

The book is excellently cross-referenced, and the advanced ideas of science are discussed intelligently and explained concisely, cutting through the jargon to bring the fascination of the concepts into lucid focus. --Stephanie Gold

From Library Journal

Written by the coauthors of The Quantum Society (Morrow, 1995), this book is essentially a mini-encyclopedia of the new science for the educated general reader. While old science portrayed a physical universe of separate parts bound to one another by rigid laws of cause and effect, this new paradigm gives us the vision of a complicated universe where all ideas are interconnected. The major portion of the book consists of 200 extended definitions of terms used in the physical sciences; medical terminology is excluded. The authors fail to give bibliographies, and the information here may be found in standard references such as the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (McGraw-Hill, 1997. 8th ed.) or Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989. 8th ed.). Moreover, the title is misleading, and how many general readers have heard of Schrodinger's allegorical cat anyway? Of questionable value.?Bruce Slutsky, New Jersey Inst. of Technology Lib., Newark
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (June 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688161073
• ISBN-13: 978-0688161071
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #960,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good, fun, one-of-a-kind book, when used cautiously, December 13, 2005

By 

Brad4d "bb" (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Who's Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat? An A-to-Z Guide to All the New Science Ideas You Need to Keep Up with the New Thinking (Paperback)

--This book gives a brief topic-by-topic discussion of several dozen subjects in what may loosely be called "New Physics" or "New Consciousness."
--Superb books on quantum physics and neuroscience already exist, but I know of no other book arranged topically. The authors briefly discuss topics ranging from pedestrian things like DNA to more exotic ones like Quantum Consciousness, and based on topics I am familiar with, the authors appear reasonably accurate (I have a doctorate, keep up with the literature, and am reasonably comfortable with science). The authors have a bias towards the holistic relational (or synchronic) interpretation of quantum theory, which gives a new age-y feel, but this book nevertheless seems pretty good and it's a lot of fun to read a few paragraphs on an interesting topic (in my biased opinion, few things are more interesting than science).
--Problems? There's no bibliography or footnotes for further research and it generally only gives one view, which is often stated as fact even though most "cutting edge" topics are controversial ("the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but an inaccurate belief that we know something").

--In short, this is (as far as I know) a unique book because of its topic-by-topic organization. It makes a delightful "soft" read although it only gives an introductory view and much of what the authors assert as factual may actually be controversial. Hope this review helps.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could not put it down!, January 13, 2001

By 

A. Pedersen (Lincoln, NE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Who's Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat? An A-to-Z Guide to All the New Science Ideas You Need to Keep Up with the New Thinking (Paperback)

I recieved this book on a Tuesday. I couldn't stop picking it up until Friday. Even now I still have it out on my desk. This isn't the type of book that you'll want to read from front to back at one sitting. Its a good reference book and an outstanding introductory book to not only the new style of physics, but physics in general.

The meat of the book does exactly what it says, it introduces the reader to the most advanced scientific principles of today. However, what I became even more interested in, (although I was plenty interested in the new ideas) was the epistimological difference between newtonian physics and quantum physics. In sparked in me an interest into the philosophy of science.

The length of the definitions of the ideas range from a half a page to three and a half pages. There is somewhere around 200 different "new ideas" of science that it introduces. All the definitions are written well with exceptional clarity, (which I was glad to see because I would of been lost otherwise.)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific layman's guide to the latest scientific theories, December 28, 2003

By 

John Grabowski (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who's Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat? An A-to-Z Guide to All the New Science Ideas You Need to Keep Up with the New Thinking (Paperback)

This is a great science book for the non-scientific type. It makes very obtuse theories and concepts crystal clear for the lay reader, and brings science to the masses *without dumbing it down.* It reminds me a lot of Charles Osgood's marvelous series "A Science Odyssey" that aired on PBS a few years back, and worth tracking down on VHS. (See my separate review on that for even more raves about science for the layperson without dumbing it down.)

Entries are brief, and sometimes I wish there were more detail. As another reviewer points out, references for further reading would be nice as well. However, if you're puzzled but intrigued by such topics as "String Theory," "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle" and "Chaos Theory," and all you know about this stuff comes from Star Trek-type shows, this is a great book for you. It also demonstrates, as the late Carl Sagan used to say, that science is far stranger, far more mysterious and far more subtle than science fiction. So much of the material covered simply seems unbelievable, but it has been tested. The quantum world in particular is a strange place, where Lewis Carroll would have been right at home. The triumph of this book is that it explains so many obtuse theories so clearly, without resorting to silly graphics or baby analogies. You *can* make this stuff accessible to the lay public without dumbing it down. It just takes work.

Highly recommended, for us non-science types especially.