The authors display the same arrogance typical of physicists who ignore most of 2,500 years of philosophical history and act like the questions raised by quantum theory are Something New Under The Sun. You can read the last two or three chapters and get the whole thing, and I can sum it up nicely here: physicists have trouble with the observer problem and get upset that they have to address something they don't (yet) have experiments for. If you liked this book, did you like it because the subject matter was fascinating, or because the book was well written? I doubt it was the latter.Įver see a cartoon where after a few scenes, you realize that the animation is just the same frames spliced over and over? This book is about 5 minutes worth of footage to make an hour cartoon. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself-and encounter quantum physics.
Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial.Įvery interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Quantum Enigma's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed. Because the authors open the closet and examine the skeleton, theirs is a controversial book. Physics' encounter with consciousness is its skeleton in the closet.
They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Einstein derided the theory's "spooky interactions." With Bell's Theorem, we now know Schr�dinger's superpositions and Einstein's spooky interactions indeed exist.Īuthors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and bits about the theory's developers. Schr�dinger showed that it "absurdly" allowed a cat to be in a "superposition" simultaneously dead and alive. Quantum Enigma explores what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conclusion, the quantum enigma, by what they observed in their laboratories. The most successful theory in all of science-and the basis of one third of our economy-says the strangest things about the world and about us.
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