Customer Reviews

Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"Finally!" I thought when I heard about this book. Popular-level physics books commonly drench themselves in the "gee whiz" factors of science communication, talking about multiple universes and dimensions and time travel, and the end result being a lot of sparkle with little substance (think Michio Kaku, whose writings are a guilty pleasure of mine). That's all well and good, but sometimes what's needed most is to debunk popular misconceptions of science. Scores of anti-creationist books have been published, but so far as I know, Stenger's book "Quantum Gods" is the ONLY book-length critique of the abuse of quantum physics.

Stenger has 40 years of experience in particle physics research, so he's imminently qualified to take on quantum mysticists like Deepak Chopra and mystically-minded "physicists" like Amit Goswami and Fritjof Capra. Though it works well on its own, it's natural to think of this book as a sequel to his previous book, "God: The Failed Hypothesis". While that book took on the interventionist god of the Abrahamic religions, "Quantum Gods" targets the remainder: Hindus and Buddhists who think quantum physics will reconcile science and (their) religion, assorted New Agers, and namby-pamby "somethingists" (people who think there's "something out there", and are "spiritual but not religious"). Shimmied in awkwardly at the end are sophisticated Christian theologians who are aware of the pitfalls of the classic arguments for the Christian God and think the indeterminacy of quantum theory gives God a way to meddle in the physical world without being detected (*yawn*, the book could have done without that chapter).

Yet "Quantum Gods" has many saving graces. Stenger's interpretation of the laws of physics, potentially mind-blowing for me, is that impartiality or "point-of-view invariance" is the source of the major laws of physics, such as the law of conservation of energy. He also had the chutzpah to challenge the "wavicle" nature of photons, saying that in reality, photons are particles, not waves, and the wave-like properties they seem to have under some circumstances are the result of predictable statistical patterns of streams of particles.

Given everything I read in this book, I still find an educated layman's logical argument against quantum idealism more effective and direct: if it is true that "the mind creates reality", than the scientific method would have been fruitless from the beginning. It is part of Chopra and Goswami's narrative that deterministic science became arrogant and was overthrown by quantum mechanics, a la Kuhn's "paradigm shift". Yet the scientific method rests on replicability and peer review. If the mind creates reality, then scientific rivals would always get different results testing the same phenomenon, no matter how well their controls are. Quantum mechanics itself has been extremely well-verified from competing groups of physicists worldwide, so ironically, if quantum idealism were true, quantum mechanics could not be.

In the end, Stenger's book is a needed defense of reductionism, determinism, materialism, and the piercing insight of the scientific frame of mind.

It is well known that Quantum Mechanics presents us with a picture of the world that is at odds with our everyday common sense. This fact has been seized on by new age gurus and some religionists to enlist Quantum theory as "proof" for their assertions. DR Stenger, who has a talent for making modern physics accessible to lay readers, takes on the new age Gurus and Quantum religionists, debunking their absurd and unsupported assertions. Along the way the reader is introduced to the real wonders of Quantum theory making this book fascinating as well as a useful source for debunking new age nonsense.

I was very disappointed in this latest book by Victor Stenger. Although I enjoyed "God: The Failed Hypothesis", and am as much a skeptic about religion and mysticism as anyone, I think Stenger completely missed the ball on this one. I expected a book along the lines of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World," in which Stenger would go case by case through modern examples of pseudoscience and debunk them one-by-one. I expected chapters on New Age practices such as homeopathy, psychic healing, and perhaps even shamanic and drug-induced mysticism. Rather, this book alternates between three types of information:

1) Rudimentary summaries of the beliefs Stenger is out to disprove (such What the Bleep Do We Know? and Trancendental Meditation) with only vague analysis. Although I find these concepts as unfounded as Stenger does, I could have found more information debunking them just by looking the up on Wikipedia. He offers only the briefest analysis of why these concepts are wrong and does not integrate this material with the physics presented in other chapters.

2) Rudimentary summaries of unrelated (and self-explanatory) scientific theories. Anyone picking up a book on quantum mechanics should presumably have some knowledge of the Copernican Revolution and evolutionary theory. This is not the place for high-school level musings of natural selection and the genius of Isaac Newton. These chapters felt condescending, and anyone who learned any new material in these chapters is not ready to be reading about quantum mechanics!

3) Advanced quantum physics. The "introductory-level" chapters in quantum theory that supposedly refute New-Age mysticism are discussed without ever really showing HOW they debunk New Age mysticism. Furthermore, while Stenger claims to be "simplyfying" the physics involved for the non-physics major, frankly I don't see how a lay-person like me is expected to make sense of it. There is no effort even to define basic terminology such as "vector" or "gauge invariance" without relating it to other equally scientific terms. A glossary would have helped.

In summary, this book alternates between material suitable for a high-schooler and material suitable for a physics major, with no attempt to get intermediate readers like myself up-to-speed. There are some writers who have the gift of explaining complex ideas to the average reader (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker come to mind), but I am still waiting for such a book on quantum theory. Too bad this wasn't it.

Here is a carefully written dose of scientific literacy, from a professional astrophysicist, on a subject for which there are any number of pseudoscientific and quackery books. Victor Stenger explains why some currently popular ideas about quantum mechanics, one of the fundamental theories of modern physics, which involve the observer creating physical reality and playing a god-like role, are simply nonsense from a scientific point of view. People will always be fond of books which tell them they can play the role of gods, but here you can see why this is just not true. Many will not find this as entertaining as the pseudoscience, but before you decide which kind of book to read ask yourself if you like playing the fool.

Vic Stenger has a no-nonsense insiders view of science. In this book he brings his expertise to bear on mysticism and obfuscation that has accumulated around the strangeness of quantum mechanics. He shows that while quantum mechanics may be counter-intuitive it doesn't support TV pitchmen like Depak Chopra or let you create your own reality as suggested by the film "What the #@%& Do We Know?" He draws some interesting philosophical conclusions about the God of a quantum universe must be like. I found it an entertaining and informative read.

I found this book to be thought-provoking and worth reading, although I have a couple of substantial criticisms. Up front, let me say it felt somewhat padded to get to book-length: about half (roughly the middle half) consists of encyclopedia entry-style sections on topics in the history of science.

The motivation behind the book is a good one: a sequel to his prior book which moves beyond traditional religion to criticize some newer and less traditional ideas about God and spirituality. He identifies two targets: the first is the group of new age-type ideas which invoke quantum mechanics (QM) to support ideas about personal spiritual powers and/or cosmic consciousness; the second is a set of attempts to accommodate God's putative role as creator or intervening agent with modern science.

With regard to the first target, I liked his debunking of new-agers who think humans "create their own reality" and thereby acquire something like paranormal powers. What I didn't like is that his own interpretation of QM is idiosyncratic: he tries to hew as close as possible to the worldview of classical materialism. He dismisses the reality of the wave-like aspect of QM, and tries to argue we can have a particle-only ontology (with one twist: the particles need to be capable of moving backward and forward in time). This is an unusual and unpersuasive interpretation.

I thought the best part of the book were the late chapters criticizing "quantum theology" - some recent ideas about accommodating religion and science. I agree with Stenger that attempts to locate divine action in emergent phenomena or in subtle manipulation of quantum outcomes are fraught with difficulty. He admits it's possible we could have a deist God if we accept that this God created an indeterministic cosmos and was willing "play dice." Such a God, of course, isn't very attractive to those who yearn for a more traditional deity. But even here Stenger's own view is that there are natural accounts of the birth of the universe which do away with the need for a creator.

Stenger doesn't devote significant space to the idea of the multiverse, although there are an increasing number of physical and cosmological theories which suggest its existence. While I agree with most of Stenger's criticisms of theology, I think the multiverse is the one conceptual place where there's the potential for a naturalistic worldview to make contact with a (non-traditional) notion of God: a transcendent and creative entity of which we are but a small part.

Since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics in early 20th century, physicists (including several of the founders of QM) were surprised about the ontological implications of it. In short, QM, which is by now the very pillar of our technological society, appears to imply that there is no objective reality that science studies, in the sense that the only way to make sense of the theory is by assuming that reality is contingent on consciousness. So, for example, Albert Einstein complained about QM implying that the moon is not there when nobody is looking. A comment attributed to Niehls Bohr is as follows: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.". Werner Heisenberg wrote: "One cannot go back to the idea of an objective real [material] world whose smallest parts exist objectively." Pascual Jordan wrote: "Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it. [...] We ourselves produce the results of measurement." Eugene Wigner wrote: "It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness [...] It will remain remarkable in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality." John Wheeler wrote: "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." And "Useful as it is under everyday circumstances o say that the world exists 'out there' independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is strange sense in which this is a 'participatory universe'". Arthur Eddington: "To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is 'mind stuff'". Bernard d'Espagnat: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." David Mermin commenting on Einstein's question: "We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks." Sir James Jeans: "The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." Martin Rees: "The universe exists because we are aware of it." Euan Squires: "Every interpretation of quantum mechanics involves consciousness." Nick Herbert published an entire book about the ontological implications of QM, "Quantum Reality". As recently as 2004 Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner published "Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness". Other excellent books are "The Ghost in the Atom" edited by Paul Davies, and "Quantum Phyisics - Illusion or Reality" by Alastair Rae. These are all no-nonsense physicists, and many of them are eminent ones. So QM represents a real problem for any materialistic understanding of reality. As philosopher Bertrand Russell put it: "It has begun to seem that matter, like the Cheshire Cat, is becoming gradually diaphanous and nothing is left but the grin, caused, presumably, by amusement at those who still think it is there". So it was with some interest I started reading Stenger's book to see how he dealt with this problem.

I couldn't be more disappointed. First of all he doesn't make any serious effort to deal with it. Rather he concentrates on the various New Age gurus who publish pseudo-science, on various paranormal claims (telepathy and the like), on the sensationalist documentary "What the Bleep do We Know?", as well as on physicists Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Amit Goswami's "The Self-Aware Universe". The latter two books interpret the quantum problem from the point of view of Eastern mysticism, which may or may not be appropriate, but which is irrelevant to the seriousness of the question at hand. The whole book strikes me as an intent to use a lot of smoke to convince the reader that there isn't really any serious problem to deal with in the first place.

The book contains many errors and misleading statements in its discussion of science. So for example on page 95 it says "The organs of the human body, including the brain, run on Newtonian mechanics" - which must be news to biochemists and neuroscientists. On page 103 it says "[Stephen Jay] Gould also insisted that there was no guarantee evolution would always act to produce increasingly complex forms of life with ever-broadening capabilities. However this remains controversial." In fact this isn't controversial but a rather obvious property of Darwinism. On page 184 it says "There is no wave-particle duality. Photons are just particles". Actually, that photons sometimes display particle-like behavior and sometimes wave-like behavior is an observational fact and one of the fundamental insights of QM. On page 207 he writes "No one has ever seen a particle moving faster than light nor transmitted information from one point to another superluminally." In fact in 1995 Horst Aichmann and Gunter Nimtz have transmitted Mozart's 40th Symphony as frequency modulated microwaves (i.e. photons) through an 11.4 cm length of barrier at a velocity of 4.7 times higher than light speed, receiving audibly recognizable music. On page 196 he claims that the "observer" in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM need not be a conscious being but may be any "passive measuring instrument". In fact what constitutes a "measurement" is much debated about and Stenger's claim above is very far from the concensus. Take for example the famous "Schrodinger's cat" thought experiment: The paradox of having a cat in a quantum superposition of being both alive and dead at the same time would not disappear were one to put a video camera inside the cat's box; rather both the cat and the camera would exist in a quantum superposition. On page 197 he criticizes Bohm's interpretation of QM by pointing out that it offers "nothing new in calculational ability and producing no unique empirical results". But the same goes for all interpretations of QM, so this is hardly grounds for criticizing one of them. On page 206 he writes "The only deterministic quantum theory is that of Bohm". Actually there is only one quantum theory. Bohm's is one out of several naturalistic interpretations of quantum theory, and his is not the only deterministic one, for Everett's so-called "many worlds" interpretation is deterministic too. On page 228 he approvingly quotes Jacques Monod who wrote: "Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation, in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution." This may be the personal belief of Monod, but it's not a belief based on science. For even though the theory of evolution allows for "pure chance" it does not require it. Indeed the Darwinian mechanism works just as well using not chance but a deterministic pseudo-random generator. That's why the theory of evolution has not falsified determinism. Stenger continues by praising those scientists who wrongly hold that the theory of evolution implies Monod's view: "This remains the view of most scientists, but only a few such as Monod, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins have the courage to say so publicly. And they are castigated for it." I don't know whether Weinberg and Dawkins share Monod's unscientific view that the theory of evolution implies randomness. Actually I doubt it. Dawkins has only claimed, correctly, that the universe we observe is just as it would be if evolution was based on blind chance - not that evolution was based on blind chance. Certainly philosopher Daniel Dennett does not share Monod's belief, as he has explicitly spoken against it.

Where things get bizarre is when Stenger tries to do philosophy. On page 64 Stenger handwaves away a major view about reality called idealism by noting that when one kicks a rock the rock kicks back; of course that would also be the case if idealism is true, so it's not like kicking a rock "refutes" idealism. On page 66 Stenger informs us that time exists only in the human mind and that time is really a human invention. On page 73 we are informed that space too is only a human invention. Humanity has "what masquerades as free will", so free will too is presumably a human invention. Even the laws of physics are "human inventions" (page 262). Amazing how when one assumes that God is just a human invention, a lot of other basic things must follow suit. - On page 211 he claims that materialism is consistent with "commonplace experience". In fact it's very difficult to see how materialism could possibly be consistent with the very fact of experience; it appears Stenger has never heard of the hard problem of consciousness, or perhaps he tries to shove it under the rug too. - A major part in the end of the book is dedicated to the question of whether the claim that God acts specially in creation is compatible with science. He mentions in some detail the ideas of several theologians in this respect but then comments on their ideas with just a few words, such as "Good try." (page 216), as if he wants to give the impression that such ideas are not worth discussing - but if so why describe them in the book in the first place? In this context Stenger quickly becomes self-contradictory: On page 241 he states that if God played such a special role in the universe then God "should leave observable physical evidence". But on page 221 he describes how God could violate the laws of physics in a way that this violation would simply not be "detectable to humans". Not to mention that if this manner of divine action is fundamentally not detectable to humans then it is incoherent to claim that it represents a violation of the laws of physics; after all we know about the laws of physics from what we can detect. On page 243 he again describes how God could act in the universe: "To have full control over all events God would have to manage the motion of every fundamental particle in the universe in a nanosecond-by nanosecond basis. I suppose, being omnipotent, he could do that." So God could massively interfere with the universe without science detecting it after all. So what's the problem? That he "gets the impression in his reading that most theologians would not be happy with that solution". So there. - When confronted with one of the few philosophical premises everybody agrees with, namely that from nothing nothing comes, he redefines "nothing" as what has no structure (page 250), but clearly that's not what "nothing" means. Argumentation by the redefinition of common concepts appears to be a fashionable trend in atheism. On page 263 we learn that we can view the Earth and humanity as "forms of frozen nothing". As I said, bizarre.

Finally, the carelessness of the book is annoying. In the foreword written by the well-known Michael Shermer we read that physicist Amit Goswami had said "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience." Shermer then informs us that in his monthly column in Scientific American he publicly challenged Goswami to leap out of a twenty-story building and consciously choose the experience of surviving the experiment. Impressive, no? Only on page 38 of his book Stenger makes explicitly clear that when Goswami says "I" or "you", as in "you make your own reality", he means the "all-pervasive cosmic consciousness" and not some individual human. So what is one to make of Shermer's huge equivocation in the foreword? Perhaps he did not read the book to which he wrote the foreword? But then again didn't Stenger read Shermer's foreword he put in his own book? Hardly likely. It's far more likely that they just don't care. It's all about making an impression.

The book does have some merits. Its explanation of some modern scientific concepts, especially in relation with special relativity, is lucid. It very convincingly criticizes all claims of top-down causality noting that in all such cases computer simulations using only bottom-up causality produce the relevant effects one ascribes to top-down causality. But on the whole this is very superficial and misleading book. Any of the books I mention above does a much better job explaining quantum weirdness.

This book is well written and concise, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of material that he hasn't already covered in books in the last decade. About 1/2 of this book was a physics lesson and he really didn't spend that much time refuting the misuse of quantum mechanics by new age gurus. All of that said, it is still a worthwhile book especially for those who have not read his previous books. If you've read his other books, you won't find much new here.

Quantum mechanics is strange and it gives us a view of the world that is against common sense. This weirdness has led gurus and the religious to make absurd claims about how quantum mechanics 'proves' their beliefs. Using established scientific theories and hard-hitting analyses, Stenger shows how the claims of the gurus and religious are void of any truth. He explains what quantum physics says, and what it does not. 'Quantum Gods' is a fascinating science book, as well as a useful guide for debunking new age nonsense.

QUANTUM GODS: CREATION, CHAOS, AND THE SEARCH FOR COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS offers a satisfying blend of hard science (quantum mechanics) and spirituality that consider connections between the human brain and the universe. Physicist Victor Stenger offers an analysis of the popular theories trying to link spirituality to physics, considering what 20th century physics findings really mean and how to blend religious basics into these new discoveries. Any science or spirituality library will find this an intriguing survey.