From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

Adam Becker

Start date: May 1, 2019

Finish date: May 31, 2019

Discussion: Book Club 2019

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Book Club 2019

December 2019 - Uninhabitable Earth
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last updated Dec 21, 2020 08:09AM

November 2019 - Invisible Women
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Nov 09, 2018 Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, favorites, physics, chaos-complexity-emergence, general-science, biography

If this book were a meal, it would be bursting with such flavor that you could not help going back for seconds. Indeed I read it a second time and chose to listen to Sean Carroll's Mysteries of Modern Physics lectures, from The Great Courses series, as the accompanying glass of wine and dessert because it reenforced the ideas presented in Becker's book. Listening to Sean Carroll's lecture series along with reading this book allowed me to think about how all of the discoveries made in the quantum If this book were a meal, it would be bursting with such flavor that you could not help going back for seconds. Indeed I read it a second time and chose to listen to Sean Carroll's Mysteries of Modern Physics lectures, from The Great Courses series, as the accompanying glass of wine and dessert because it reenforced the ideas presented in Becker's book. Listening to Sean Carroll's lecture series along with reading this book allowed me to think about how all of the discoveries made in the quantum world apply to time. I warn you though, it's a rabbit hole. Since there are no final answers yet, your brain might get caught in an obsessive trap. I have now moved on to re-reading Lisa Ranall's Warped passages, not because I am convinced of other dimensions, but because thinking about pocket dimensions and/or bubble universes seemed extremely important to me after reading Becker and Carroll together. I also can't seem to stop thinking about how all of this relates to gravity, and keep rereading sections of Gravity's Engines by Caleb Scharf. Sometimes I feel so sad when I realize I will die before someone can answer the burning questions in my mind about the way the universe works, but nothing feels better than thinking about what we do know.

While mainly focusing on the measurement problem in quantum physics (does the wave function collapse) , Becker recounts the history of many of the major discoveries and provided an extremely intuitive account of the following aspects of quantum mechanics:

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Double slit
Schrödinger's cat
Everett's many worlds
Copenhagen Interpretation (probability / wave function collapse)
The Bohr - Einstein debates
EPR paradox

Becker included in depth and intensely refreshing biographies of John Bell and his inequality and David Bohm's unorthodox ideas. The biography of Bohm was particularly of interest to me because not too long ago I finished a series of books about the discovery of quantum theory and while many of those books covered the other people highlighted in this book, none of them covered Bohm in the manner Becker did.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. Rating a book like this always makes me realize how my previous 5 star ratings muddy the waters. I want there to be a 6 star rating you could use once or twice a year, so that you can really set a book apart from others. This book would be worthy of that 6 star rating. ...more

25 likes · Like · see review

May 29, 2023 bup rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction-books-are-300-pages-rule, science, trying-to-get-theoretical-physics, 2023

This serves as a really cool rundown of the elephant in the quantum physics room - the establishment of the idea, early in quantum physics, that measuring a particle causes something to happen, and (in extreme philosophies) the very idea that you can talk about whether the particle had any sort of reality before measurement is verboten.

It's told as a historical narrative of the problem, and the generations-long struggle to get physicists who believed reality existed/exists independent of anyone' ...more

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