Beyond The Quantum

This clearly explained layman's introduction to quantum physics is an accessible excursion into metaphysics and the meaning of reality. Herbert exposes the quantum world and the scientific and philosophical controversy about its interpretation.

The present wave of interest in quantum foundations is caused by the tremendous development of quantum information science and its applications to quantum computing and quantum communication. It has become clear that some of the difficulties encountered in realizations of quantum information processing have roots at the very fundamental level. To solve such problems, quantum theory has to be reconsidered. This book is devoted to the analysis of the probabilistic structure of quantum theory, probing the limits of classical probabilistic representation of quantum phenomena.

Quantum theory attempts to describe the discrete or atomic nature of matter and the physical world. Certain paradoxes connected with the use of our familiar ideas of the theory have led some physicists to suggest that a revision of quantum theory at its most fundamental level is now inevitable, while others think that the wide range of experimental success of the theory make such changes literally unthinkable. This book contains the edited papers presented at a small informal colloquium held in Cambridge in 1968 to discuss the need for fundamental revision in quantum theory. Most schools of thought on the foundations of the theory were represented, and to direct discussion some participants proposed actual changes. A principal aim was to pinpoint the source of difficulty in current ideas of the time or, failing that, to present alongside each other the various viewpoints about them.

Already Einstein could never see quantum mechanics as a complete theory. Nowadays, many researchers, including 't Hooft, view quantum mechanics as a statistical description of some underlying reality. The workshop Beyond the Quantum, organized in Spring 2006 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, was one of the first meetings completely devoted to physics that may need an explanation beyond quantum mechanics. A broad variety of subjects was covered. The present book reflects this.

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.