In this fascinating and accessible book, physicist Victor J. Stenger guides the lay reader through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads. Dr. Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the nonspecialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important findings of contemporary physics.
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Concerned that mysticism seems to be invading physics, physicist Stenger embarks in this book on a voyage to debunk quackery in the quantum world. Heading his New Age opponents off at the pass, Stenger devotes a hefty chunk of his text to the experiments in which the behavior of electrons is interpreted as a wave/particle duality. According to his presentation, some mystics seize on that indeterminacy of the quantum world as evidence that hidden, supernatural forces seethe beneath the quantum world. Since electrons apparently move around regardless of time and space, surely the consciousness can, too? Stenger may have to tolerate such assertions when nonphysicists like Deepak Chopra write best-selling proclamations that the human mind is immortal. However, when esteemed collegial physicist-authors (e.g., Roger Penrose and Paul Davies) also see proofs of God in quantum theory or a purposefully designed universe, poor Stenger's patience runs out. His goal is to warn off readers of those authors. He also hopes to keep current physics students from making the same error, and libraries may consider acquisition with them in mind. Gilbert Taylor
Review
The term "quantum" taken out of its original scientific context has become the mantra of a new metaphysics which purports to find a convergence between the picture of reality presented by physics and the world view of traditional Eastern mysticism. The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics In Modern Physics And Cosmology is a fascinating and accessible book wherein physicist Victor Stenger guides the lay reader through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads popularized by such authors as Deepak Chopra and Fritjof Capra. Dr. Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the nonspecialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important finds of contemporary physics. Stenger makes it clear that current scientific hypotheses about the material nature of reality are all we need to explain the available evidence and that mystical notions say more about the human need to believe than about the fundamental makeup of the universe. The Unconscious Quantum is a refreshing antidote to a great deal of New Age misinformation & misunderstandings. -- Midwest Book Review
Product Details
Hardcover: 322 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books; First Edition edition (November 1, 1995)
Victor J. Stenger grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.
Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a master's of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.
His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.
Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World beyond the Senses (1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (2006); God: The Failed Hypothesis--How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007); Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (2009); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009); The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us (2011); God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (2012). God: The Failed Hypothesis made the New York Times Best Seller List in March 2007.
Vic and his wife, Phylliss, have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. They travel the world as often as they can.
Dr. Stenger maintains a website where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger.
Stenger is a physicist completely at home in contemporary mathematical physics, yet incurably curious about the deeper philosophical issues brought up by quantum mechanics. I have read many books attempting to explain quantum mechanics to the layman and I consider this the most careful and enlightening--also quite up to date (even in the year 2000).
The problems arising around quantum mechanics can be analyzed using the famous Bell equation, which Stenger develops extremely nicely (although it helps to be able to read the simple algebra in the optional 'boxes'). The violation of Bell's inequality, he argues (drawing on many technical papers and books) violates either Determinism + Locality or Separability + Locality, or Completeness + Locality (all terms well defined in the book). He argues strongly that quantum mechanics does not violate Locality itself,which Stenger takes as very important to maintain.
Stenger presents the classical Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of the wave function, as well as Bohm's hidden variable interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation, and the most recent (and to my mind satisfying) decoherence approach.
The Unconscious Quantum's main message is that modern physics provides absolutely no support for New Age and more traditionally religious notions of supernaturalism. Stenger is refreshing in not denying the existence of spirituality, but holding that the world of spirituality does not, as far as we know, intersect the natural world described in the natural sciences. "While I cannot bring myself to worship a hypothesis," he notes, "I have no wish to disparage those who do. I simply ask that they not assume that science, in its current state, provides any buttress for their belief...
..."
This does not mean Stenger supports New Age guruism. In a truly beautiful passage he says, "Anyone listening to New Age gurus and modern Christian preachers cannot miss the emphasis on the individual finding easy gratification, rather than sacrificing and selflessly laboring for a better world. Holisitic philosophy is the perfect self-delusion for the spointed brat of any age, all decked out in the latest fashion, who loves to talk about solving the problems of the world but has no intention of sweating a drop in acheiving this noble goal."
Dr. Stenger can be informative and even witty but ultimately I'd have to say this book is more than a little misleading. Other reviewers have walked away with the notion that quantum mechanics "makes perfect sense", something few thoughtful physicists would be comfortable saying. I'm an atheist who has no patience with New Age writers but Stenger seems to be almost obssessively on guard against any hint of mysticism, weirdness or even ambiguity. The book is published by an off-shoot of the magazine SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, and it shares that publication's tendency to strike an almost holier-than-thou tone -- or I should say a "rationaler-than-thou" tone. Stenger does too much sneering and dismissing. He tries to buffalo his readers by assuring them that the mathematics of quantum mechanics isn't weird -- just the WORDS are. That's a weak argument at best. Applied mathematics doesn't usually lead to paradoxical physical concepts. Stenger's own preferred interpretation of QM involves recognizing that the relativistic version of the Schrodinger equation has solutions that imply backward travel in time. In other words, he capitalizes on the weirdness implicit in the purportedly unweird mathematics (Traditionally the "reverse" solutions are ignored.) Incidentally, Stenger argues that time-travel on a sub-atomic scale somehow doesn't even qualify as weird -- just counter-intuitive. That, apparently, is a more rational word than "weird".
Stenger repeatedly belittles alternate interpretations of QM and points out that functionally all serious interpretations are the same. This means that the interpretations he favors have no more going for them technically than the ones he derides.... His objections are as much philosophical as they are scientific -- and yet thoughout the book he is contemptuous of philosophical considerations. He finds holistic hidden variables implausible but then acknowleges (very much in passing) that his time-travel variation of QM is also not accepted by most physicists. Apparently one's philosophical perspective is more important than Stenger wants to admit. He even goes so far as to say that most practicing physicists don't think at all about philosophic stuff -- so it can't be very important. That's another misrepresentation. Many, maybe most, physicists simply memorize the formalisms of their profession and contribute little to its development. The giants of QM, on the other hand, were frequently aware of and intrigued by the implications of their formalisms. John Bell, a man Stenger admires, spent his career encouraging scientists to more closely examine the assumptions of the Copenhagen interpretation -- and he made a hallmark contribution to QM because of his philosophical curiosity.
Stenger seems always on edge at the thought of holism and this leads to another of the book's repeated contradictions. His suggestion that particles from the future travel back to the past and influence the present seems pretty darned "holistic" to me. (That's not to say it couldn't be true.) Why is spatial holism metaphysical while temporal holism merely counter-intuitive? Both ideas have theoretical justifications and neither has significant empirical support. Why should only one of these theories be considered respectable? Why shouldn't both be further developed?
Decoherence is an intriguing idea but also seems to have more than a tinge of holism about it. (Sub-atomic particles, the theory says, have an existence because of each other. What collapses all those mysterious wave functions [or rather, what renders collapse unneccessary] is the interactive nature of reality itself. The theory still seems to suggest -- like its precusor interpretation, Copenhagen -- that if taken individually particles don't always precisely exist.)
Contrast Brian Greene's new book with this one. Green has a deep appreciation for De Broglie-Bohm hidden variables, while by no means accepting that the theory is on the right track. He admires decoherence but recognizes that to date it's still begging a few questions. Also consider John Gribbin's Q IS FOR QUANTUM. It's a basic, excellent and nuanced overview of the field in the form of an encyclopedia. Gribbin is fair to all serious interpretations of QM, while making his own preferences clear. He doesn't slight the partly-philosophical motivation for those preferences.
Lastly, let me again stress that the weirdness of QM is not purely, or even largely, a useless metaphysical misconception. Technicians have forced a single atom to occupy two separate places at the same moment. As Stan Lee would put it, "Nuff said."Read more ›
Contrary to some of the other reviews, I think this is a pretty good book. Let me point out that my own background is astrophysics (undergrad) and mathematics (grad). Stenger does a creditable job of laying out the major philosophical issues of quantum theory. He has included some sidebars for the more mathematically sophisticated. My own reading left me feeling that Stenger's aim is primarily to urge readers to approach any extrapolation from quantum facts to quantum ontologies with a great deal of skepticism. Many people have construed issues of measurement to mean that 'mind' collapses wave functions. Stenger points out that 'mind' is not easily defined, is likely an emergent property of base matter, and suggests we stop reverting to Cartesian dualism every time things get confused. He discusses De Broglie and Bohm's guiding field, and points out that regardless of its correctness, it provides a viable alternative ontology, so clearly the mystical approach is not a foregone conclusion. The book could be better. It would be nice if he spent a bit more time discussing some of the confusion regarding 'mind', but I think he has done a good job of laying out the basic issues for the well-educated lay person, and of urging skepticism before seizing upon strange phenomena as a justification for one's metaphysics.
This book is a great companion to Dancing Wu Li Masters. Where Dancing Wu Li Masters gives a good, somewhat mystical overview of quantum physics and the history of its development, The Unconscious Quantum shows that people who want to understand quantum physics need not resort to mysticism or Eastern philosophy. While Stenger does address mystical interpretations when summarizing the history of quantum physics, he concludes by offering a logical, consistent, non-mystical paradigm.
Stenger acknowledges that the microworld of quanta cannot be viewed in the same way as the macroworld of concrete objects that make up our everyday experience. However, if people are willing to suspend their everyday intuition and accept some very logical but unintuitive concepts, like time symmetry and decoherence, then the quantum world makes perfect sense without mastering Zen or contemplating your navel.
Stenger also shoots down the ideas of consciousness directly affecting the physical world, and faster-than-light communication between quantum particles. He explains the EPR "paradox" and other experiments which spawned these interpretations, and how they can easily be resolved using the simple but unintuitive concepts already mentioned.
The text is written for the science amateur, and requires little background knowledge, but some persistence with technical concepts (you may have to read a few parts twice to get the idea). Supporting equations are included in boxes, separate from the text. The text stands alone, but mathaholics are welcome to indulge themselves in the formulae.... The first six chapters are the most technical, but it gets much easier after that, and it's definitely worth it for anbody who wants a genuine understanding of quantum physics, sans the mystical rhetoric that pervades most pop literature on the subject.Read more ›
