by David Kordahl
This column is ultimately a review of A Guess at the Riddle: Essays on the Physical Underpinnings of Quantum Mechanics, the short new book by David Z Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University and (as I found out last week) the graduate advisor of the founding editor of 3QuarksDaily, S. Abbas Raza. Unlike Raza, I have never met Albert, but my parasocial relationship with his work is midway through its second decade, which I am now acknowledging upfront.
I first became aware of David Z Albert when I was an undergraduate at a small Lutheran college in rural Iowa. On its top floor, the Wartburg College library had a large painting of Martin Luther, our hero, overseeing a bonfire of Catholic theology. But in the basement, where the unburnt books were held, I found a copy of Albert’s 1992 debut, Quantum Mechanics and Experience. The book’s style seemed wholly unusual to me. As a physics student, I wasn’t accustomed to books that were at once about science but somehow separate from it. I was impressed how Albert had retained only enough detail for a conceptual critique. I didn’t know, then, that its peculiar patois was just that of the analytic philosophers, with Albert merely adopting an eccentric dialect of that communal tongue.
In my last column for 3QD, I wrote about how quantum models work. A physical system is associated with a quantum state. As time passes, the quantum state changes according to a deterministic rule, the Schrodinger equation, branching smoothly into distinct outcomes. At the end, you compare how much of the wave-function—what percentage of its total squared amplitude—is parked in each possible branch, and this gives you the probability of observing each outcome.
Quantum Mechanics and Experience is a book about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which (roughly) is the question of how nature decides which one of the predicted possibilities within the final quantum state we actually end up observing. Albert’s book wasn’t my first exposure these issues—I had read Nick Herbert’s 1987 book, Quantum Reality, a few years earlier—but it represented the first time I got the sense that these issues were still debated, and still up for grabs. Read more »
Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a great deal of technical detail and risk making the book opaque to most readers without specialized training. All scientists face this challenge, but for physicists it’s particularly acute because of the mathematical nature of their field. Especially if you want to explain the two towering achievements of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, you can’t really get away from the math. It seems that physicists are stuck between a rock and a hard place: include math and, as the popular belief goes, every equation risks cutting their readership by half or, exclude math and deprive readers of a deeper understanding. The big question for a physicist who wants to communicate the great ideas of physics to a lay audience without entirely skipping the technical detail thus is, is there a middle ground?
Religion has always had an uneasy relationship with money-making. A lot of religions, at least in principle, are about charity and self-improvement. Money does not directly figure in seeking either of these goals. Yet one has to contend with the stark fact that over the last 500 years or so, Europe and the United States in particular acquired wealth and enabled a rise in people’s standard of living to an extent that was unprecedented in human history. And during the same period, while religiosity in these countries varied there is no doubt, especially in Europe, that religion played a role in people’s everyday lives whose centrality would be hard to imagine today. Could the rise of religion in first Europe and then the United States somehow be connected with the rise of money and especially the free-market system that has brought not just prosperity but freedom to so many of these nations’ citizens? Benjamin Friedman who is a professor of political economy at Harvard explores this fascinating connection in his book “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”. The book is a masterclass on understanding the improbable links between the most secular country in the world and the most economically developed one.
Throughout history there have been prophets of doom and prophets of hope. The prophets of doom are often more visible; the prophets of hope are often more important. The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg is a prophet of hope. For more than ten years he has been questioning the consensus associated with global warming. Lomborg is not a global warming denier but is a skeptic and realist. He does not question the basic facts of global warming or the contribution of human activity to it. He does not deny that global warming will have some bad effects. But he does question the exaggerated claims, he does question whether it’s the only problem worth addressing, he certainly questions the intense politicization of the issue that makes rational discussion hard and he is critical of the measures being proposed by world governments at the expense of better and cheaper ones. Lomborg is a skeptic who respects the other side’s arguments and tries to refute them with data.