Synopses & Reviews
By questioning the validity of some of our basic concepts, such as space, object, and causality, quantum physics contributes quite decisively to the dramatic changes now taking place in our world picture.This book is addressed not only to physicists at an early stage in their careers (the first or second year graduate student) but also to philosophers, as well as to all the senior physicists interested in the interpretation problem. Beginning with a chapter that could be described as philosophy for physicists,” it presents an in-depth analysis of present-day quantum mechanical concepts, an analysis of physicists and philosophers alike. Specifically, it first offers an extensive critical analysis of such topics as the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen reality criterion, nonseparatability, the quantum measurement riddle, decoherence theory, consistent histories approaches and ontologically interpretable theories. All this then naturally leads to philosophical questions concerning, in particular, intersubjective agreement and the limit of realism. And a thorough examination of this whole material finally leads to the view that distinguishing between empirical reality and a veiled man-independent reality yields an acceptable answer to the perplexing question of how to interpret quantum physics. Veiled Reality offers nonspecialists, including students in physics, philosophy and the history of science, an accessible perspective on basic problems in the foundations of physics.
Synopsis
While quantum mechanics appears as being the most basic element of contemporary physics, its meaning remains mysterious to the very physicists who make use of it, and is acknowledged as such by all those among them who care about such questions. The final message of the bookstemming from a careful, comprehensive analysisis that this apparent obscurity is there to stay, in the sense that what quantum mechanics (and therefore the whole of physics) describes in detail is not what could be consistently referred to as man-independent reality”. It is essentially what philosophers call empirical reality,” that is, reality as seen through the colored glasses” or our sensorial equipment and our possibilities of action. Of mind-independent reality we perceive, at best, some distorted general structures. It is veiled.
About the Author
Bernard dEspagnat, Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris, Orsay, was born in Fourmagnac, France, on August 22, 1921. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Sorbonne in 1950. He was a research physicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and at CERN in Geneva. In 1959, dEspagnat joined the University of Paris, where he was professor at both the Paris and Orsay campuses. Professor dEspagnat was director of the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Particules Elementaires, Orsay, from 1970 to 1987. In 1996 he was elected into the Institut de France (Académie des Sciences morales et politiques) as a philosopher of science.