What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

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The best book I have read about quantum mechanics and its challenges in recent years.

I really enjoyed and appreciated this book. I would highly suggest it to anyone and I do not have a science degree.

I agree with most other reviewers: this is a magisterially well-informed, brilliantly insightful and thoroughly enjoyable look at the wild and woolly progress of attempts to date to provide some kind of coherent account of the foundations of QM.Adam Becker's account of the personal and professional mechanisms behind the rise of the Copenhagen Interpretation(CI) to almost unchallenged dominance in its field is especially important. I also heartily endorse his call for more informed collaboration and mutual respect among philosophers and scientists.I do have some caveats.First, I think Professor Becker underestimates the degree to which subjective and institutional factors are also shaping current non-CI interpretations, though his riveting biographical accounts of the thinkers involved certainly can be taken as notes towards such an sequel.Second, I believe there is more preliminary work to be done in unsnarling the conceptual entanglements that led thinkers like Bohr and Heisenberg to see the need for something like CI in the first place. For example, the earliest thinkers about quantum "indeterminacy" utterly failed to distinguish between radically different ontological and epistemological meanings of "determine" (ont determining = bringing things about in the world; epist determining = ascertaining a value or result). This helps explain some of the bizarre paths early QM pioneers chose to follow. They simply failed to realize that our lacking information due to instrumental limits remains a story about us, not about the underlying and preexisting physical situations we're attempting to model (lack of evidence remains no evidence of lack, even in QM).Finally, I think Professor Becker's attempt to defend interpretations based on the universality of Schrodinger's Equation are a bit overenthusiastic. Surely we first need a clear idea of what relationships exist among quantitative models that can be successfully used as a basis for prediction and manipulation, the conceptual readings we can give those models, and the physical world of natural and cosmic history they attempt to abstractly represent before we take leaps of faith like the various Many World/Multiverse interpretations seriously. (To his credit, Professor Becker does, rightly, urge keeping multiple interpretations in mind and holding them loosely rather than rushing to judgement.)Enough back-benching. None of these reservations should deter anyone from reading, and being delighted by, this really terrific book from a scholar who knows his stuff and can actually write.

The book is better than I thought. It elucidates the different theories behind quantum mechanics, which I didn’t know about. Not only that, it tells why the Copenhagen interpretation is the predominant one and how it has screwed up the world of physics. It traces the history of it, how sinister the theory is, and how the fathers of quantum mechanics are to blame for it. I think this is going to be seen as historic work in the history of science that paved the path for the physicists of the future