Quantum Mechanics and Experience

David Z Albert, David Z. ALBERT

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674741133
  9780674741126
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674020146
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Physics
• Index: Biological Sciences

The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science.

This book is an original and provocative investigation of that challenge, as well as a novel attempt at writing about science in a style that is simultaneously elementary and deep. It is a lucid and self-contained introduction to the foundations of quantum mechanics, accessible to anyone with a high school mathematics education, and at the same time a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of that subject, some of which are due to the author himself.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Superposition
• 2. The Mathematical Formalism and the Standard Way of Thinking about It
• 3. Nonlocality
• 4. The Measurement Problem
• 5. The Collapse of the Wave Function
• 6. The Dynamics by Itself
• 7. Bohm’s Theory
• 8. Self-Measurement
• Appendix: The Kochen-Healy-Dieks Interpretations
• Bibliography
• Index