his first book is quantum physics: illusion or reality? by alastair rae
this is quite a popular book on quantum physics – there’s not a single equation in there, I think. what it does is it goes through all the main ways we’re trying to understand quantum physics, all the main interpretations. he is extremely good because he writes in a very objective way and it is very difficult to know which one he supports. it’s also very passionately argued, and it’s a beautiful exposition, very philosophical. I think it’s the best folktale, probably my favorite, of all the things we discuss about the fundamental aspect of quantum physics.
You are reading: Best books on quantum physics
There are all sorts of weird views on what quantum physics really is.
correct. there are connections to religion, then there are extremes that say it’s all in the mind: basically nothing becomes real until we consciously measure it, look at it and record it. on the other hand, there is the point of view that it is as real as anything else, it is out there independently of us, etc. talks about these two extreme points of view and what quantum physics tells us about this very old question: whether the world is ideal or real.
does it solve it?
He really leaves it open because, to be completely honest about these issues, I don’t think we have something that is universally accepted as a point of view: each one has a lot of positive points but also something that makes it a point of view not completely plausible. hold. It is a very nice book.
your second book?
the ghost in the atom. this was actually a sequence of radio interviews recorded by paul davies, who is probably the best physics popularizer we have.
Is he the guy from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
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correct. he has also written a book about it. I think in the 70’s/80’s he did a series of radio interviews with about 10 of the leading physicists of the time. and the spirit is similar to that of the previous book in that it all has to do with how we understand unusual phenomena in quantum physics. the book is written as a dialogue, davies asks a question and then the interviewee answers, and i would say that this format makes for a much more exciting read than typical prose where someone expounds something. it also addresses personal issues, which are not normally addressed in these books, in that it asks each person how they got engaged, when they first learned quantum mechanics, how they learned it. It’s really fantastic, an amazing read.
Who are you talking to?
people like john bell, who came up with bell’s inequality, which was a way of quantifying weirdness in quantum mechanics; then david bond, who has one of those interpretations that tries to retain, i would say, some kind of reality in quantum mechanics, arguing that the world is still as real as it was in a newtonian-type framework. davies chose one person to represent each of these views, and it’s really interesting how the interview takes place and then where it leads: how different people end up in completely different parts of quantum physics, and what they find exciting, etc. . .
leads you to believe that maybe people are delving into quantum physics to test an idea they already had?
That’s an interesting point. It’s hard to say what comes before what, right? we kind of have these inner feelings, all of us, about how we think the world should be. and we usually carry this bias with us in our research as well, so it’s not clear if he comes with a bias and then he’s trying to use this theory to confirm what he already thought the world was like before that. In this type of interview it’s easy to expose this kind of thing: you can see that people started with some ideas and then maybe they changed them or didn’t change them while doing their research.
All these unifying theories that quantum mechanics proves seem to have already been postulated in literature or religion or whatever.
yes, I don’t think there is anything really new that has been contributed philosophically by quantum mechanics. the key principle I would say is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is one element that can never be made more deterministic. And of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has been around for a long time. If you go back to the ancient Greeks, I think you’ll see a spectrum of all these worldviews already present there.
your next book?
In physics, we always study simple and inanimate objects, so it is very difficult for physicists to understand, for example, weather patterns or financial markets. whatever is more complicated, we don’t seem to have the same understanding that we have with atoms or things like that, so I think that’s exactly where I’d like to go with the next three books. First of all, what is life? By Erwin Schrodinger. he was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and then in the 1940s he started thinking about biology. at that time the big problem was how biological information is encoded. this is just before watson and crick found the structure of dna and explained everything. however, about ten years earlier, shroedinger asked this question: can i take this very simplistic way of thinking about physics that we like to reduce everything to a very simple mathematical formula (which seems to work quite well) and take it’s? move on to biology and start to understand some more complicated processes within a cell, or maybe even the propagation of light, in terms of physics? the interesting thing is that he concludes somewhere that classical Newtonian mechanics is probably not enough to understand biological things, and that we would have to use full quantum mechanics to understand that. and it comes so close to getting the mechanism right for propagating biological information that it almost succeeds in taking out watson and crick.
did it get as far as the idea of a building block?
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yes. he just didn’t know enough biology to identify dna: he thought it was another form, another crystalline form, but he was very close to it. just using basic physical principles, he figured out what kind of medium he needs to do this in a stable way. the book is written on a thoroughly popular level and was apparently highly influential in the decades that followed. many people who read it and were studying physics immediately switched to biology. it acted as a great stimulus for people to get into more complicated topics. subsequent research was crucial: all x-ray crystallography applied to dna; he did not have that information at the time.
next book?
this is really very famous and i think you’re right: the selfish gene, richard dawkins: i love that book. when you look at the theories of physics, they’re actually expressed very precisely with mathematical formulas, and if you’re trying to make a prediction of a physical system, you can do it extremely well with very high precision. So, for example, if you want to know where Mars will be in 10,000 years, our laws of physics are so precise that you can actually do that with extremely good accuracy. however, when you look at more complicated things like biology and you want to say, well, can I look at a species and say what’s going to happen in terms of evolution in 10,000 years? so of course it’s very difficult, and I don’t think anyone has any idea how to make this more mathematical. but the first time i saw how far you can go, and i was really surprised, was with the selfish gene. because the theory of evolution seems to a physicist much less rigorous than any theory we have in physics, it just doesn’t have the power to predict things in the same way. you have these two basic principles: the random mutation of the genetic material and then the subsequent deliberate selection by the environment of whether or not the resulting individual survives these genetic modifications. Dawkins’s book was the first time anyone tried to make the theory very mathematical, and fully explain it, and tried to make predictions based on it.
You’re saying, how far can I go in terms of simplicity and try to explain everything in the biological world just in terms of very simple units? in this case, of course, it would be the genes. dawkins approach as he writes is extremely nice and i think he is the best popular science writer. no one else really compares. It made me think that ultimately you could apply physics to biology and really boil it down further, because you know that once you boil biological behavior down to genetics, then of course now you’re working with genetics and molecules, and that’s the subject of chemistry, which itself is based on quantum physics. so in a way you have this beautiful pyramid of explanations: starting with quantum physics, then explaining basic chemical laws based on quantum physics and then from chemistry you try to explain genetics and then more complicated living organisms. somehow it all fits into this nice scientific logic.
your latest book?
We can scientifically explain living systems very well, but what about human beings? what about the mind? I don’t think we have any idea in science really about how to attack this problem. because, even defining what the mind or consciousness is, this is still completely open, and in science we have to have a good definition. So now we are no longer talking about biology; we are actually talking about sociology. Can we explain the interactions between human beings, between societies, with a logic similar to the one we use to explain biology, for example? the book that made a big difference there and spawned a whole field in sociology and economics is called the evolution of cooperation by robert axelrod. it’s also a popular book without equations, but basically what it means is that you can use the exact same math that we use in physics and biology to start attacking more complicated things like this cooperation problem. if you relate it back to the selfish gene, which claims that the underlying human behavior is this selfishness of genes in some sense, then of course any cooperative behavior becomes a mystery. why do we ever cooperate with each other? why do we have this built in? And why do societies or tribes cooperate with other tribes and other societies? axelrod really tries to explain this in this book, that he spawned this whole field of taking game theory from mathematics and trying to apply it to the social context to understand conflict and cooperation and so on.
what does he discover?
I believe that even if you have an underlying selfish tendency, cooperation can evolve simply because you are forced to interact with another person over and over again. if you interact with someone only once, then there is no incentive to cooperate. but if you know that you will be interacting with a person over and over again, where you can check and verify what the other person is doing, and more importantly, if you don’t know how long this interaction is going to last, then somehow the math would suggest that it’s better for you to move on to cooperation instead of remaining selfish. it goes through many computer simulations and also experiments with people and some animal species to show that cooperation can evolve. so in a way it’s a very optimistic book in that sense: although we know that the first instinct is to protect your own interest, somehow it seems that evolution would really favor cooperation.
doesn’t that depend on the context? At Goldman Sachs, you can interact every day and still act selfishly.
correct. the point is that we are really at the beginning of trying to apply the same logic to complex systems, and perhaps ultimately impossible to fully understand, explain, and predict. but somehow books like this encouraged me a little more that this might be possible.
This interview was first published in 2010.
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