Customer Reviews

Is Nature Supernatural? A Philosophical Exploration of Science and Nature

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Before I read this, I understood that nobody really understands quantum physics. Now I understand this even better. Altman's ideas come at you so fast that most passages require two readings for basic comprehension. In a 600-page book, that's a lot of reading. And while his style is witty, his sentence structures can be complex to the point of distraction. Apparently he is not a feline fan, as he feels it is necessary to remove the cat from his discussion of Schroedinger and substitute Italian adulterers. Frankly, I understood the cat much better.

Still, I can comprehend and admire the way he deftly punches holes in common myths such as those concerning causality, and reduction of the wave function. And I can't say when it happened, but my attitude towards quantum physics shifted somewhere during this read. The microworld now seems kind of normal and classical mechanics seems a bit weird. That's what wavicles will do to you.

To all appearances this book is its septuagenarian author's intellectual swan song. That would explain why Dr. Altmann feels compelled to share his very considerable knowledge of JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING in the process of expatiating on his philosophy of mathematics and natural science. Unfortunately, the virtues of Dr. Altmann's insights are all but obscured by a self-indulgent, often digressive, and unnecessarily dense exposition.

Dr. Altmann writes from the perspective of a nuanced naturalism which rejects mind-body dualism and which denies that reality has a non-contingent component: a transcendental ("Platonic" or "supernatural") dimension. By demonstrating how our intuitions are based on (and limited by) macrocosmic experience, Dr. Altmann does much to demystify our counterintuitive experiences on the frontier of the macrocosmic with the microcosmic, the domain of quantum mechanics. This is the book's great virtue. Alas, the price which Dr. Altmann exacts of the reader for this illumination will be too much for many to bear.

The prolix richness of Dr. Altmann's book is its great weakness. Here, more is definitely less. The conscientious reader will be self-sentenced to hours of hard labor mining the occasional gem of insight into the nature of Nature (and of Nature's study) from dense veins of didactic, mostly Teutonic, and often soporific prose. After a close reading of Dr. Altmann's magnum opus, constant reader can only sympathize with the schoolgirl who once wrote: "This book is all about penguins. In fact, it told me more about penguins than I ever really wanted to know!"