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Published by John Murray Press, 2018, hardcover, illustrated, index, 370 pages, condition: new.
Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favoured practical experiments over philosophical arguments. As a result, questioning the status quo long meant professional ruin. And yet, from the 1920s to today, physicists like John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth.
An embarrassing thing for the physics community to admit is that we don't have a working description of reality. And it isn't just because of insufficient data, technological limits and incomplete theories - of course these problems exist, but in addition we don't seem to know what to make of the data we do have - to be precise we don't seem to know how to interpret the theories that exist and work really well for known systems. We have a recipe, we know how to plug in input and get really good results, but what does that reveal to us about reality? Strictly speaking, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics goes so far as to deny an observer independent reality. And this is a blow to scientific realism - the idea that nature, or the universe itself, exists independent of us, or independent of our observations.
Scientific realism seems more obvious, but what dominates quantum mechanics today, as it did many decades ago when quantum mechanics was just gaining popularity, is the Vienna circle's logical positivism. Logical positivism only accepts statements that are verifiable as true - so, in line with Copenhagen's metaphysical interpretation of reality, the Vienna circle rejected any questions pertaining to the 'unobservable' and labelled them 'meaningless.' You have to appreciate the irony here. The Vienna circle was almost vehemently against metaphysics, yet their influence was crucial to ensuring that the Copenhagen interpretation's dominance.
Adam Becker writes extensively about the nature of many scientific debates over quantum foundations, he artfully presents the story of the invention and rise of the Copenhagen interpretation. Yet what sets this book apart from the other numerous ones on quantum physics is its search for alternatives, its in-depth examination of the work and the lives of the physicists who dared to question the validity of the Copenhagen interpretation and the subsequent ostracism they faced within the scientific community. He presents the three main alternatives: Bohm's pilot wave theory, Everett's many worlds interpretation and the GRW spontaneous collapse theory. This book is as much about physicists and their lives as it is about the physcis they developed. A central figure across all these stories is John Stewart Bell. Bell is now a cult figure, and in my opinion he is also one of the few amongst the disturbingly many who actually deserves that cult status. He was as humble as he was ingenious, and his careful examination of conditions of non-locality and contextuality changed the way we look at quantum mechanics, and therefore reality at large.
Becker also importantly points out that these disputes aren't unscientific in the same way that pseudoscientific claims are. Of course we have a case of scientism here, but it's a matter of perspectives and interpretations and not outright negation/denial of facts. We have a measurement problem and we have different ways of approaching that problem.
So what is real? We don't know, but as all scientists before us did, we must hope that we will have the answers some day.
