The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology | 
 enlarge | Author: Victor J. Stenger
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Category: Book
List Price: $39.98
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 791626
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 322
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 1573920223
Dewey Decimal Number: 113
EAN: 9781573920223
Publication Date: November 1995
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Condition: clean pages good condition overall sharp corners tight spine All new inventory received to basement All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
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Product Description
In this fascinating and accessible book, physicist Victor J Stenger guides lay readers through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads. Dr Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the non-specialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important findings of contemporary physics.
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 Misleading Claims and a Defensive Tone Undermine Book August 14, 2004
D. N. Tarpley (Concord, CA United States)
37 out of 46 found this review helpful
Dr. Stenger can be informative and even witty but ultimately I'd have to say this book is more than a little misleading. Other reviewers have walked away with the notion that quantum mechanics "makes perfect sense", something few thoughtful physicists would be comfortable saying. I'm an atheist who has no patience with New Age writers but Stenger seems to be almost obssessively on guard against any hint of mysticism, weirdness or even ambiguity. The book is published by an off-shoot of the magazine SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, and it shares that publication's tendency to strike an almost holier-than-thou tone -- or I should say a "rationaler-than-thou" tone. Stenger does too much sneering and dismissing. He tries to buffalo his readers by assuring them that the mathematics of quantum mechanics isn't weird -- just the WORDS are. That's a weak argument at best. Applied mathematics doesn't usually lead to paradoxical physical concepts. Stenger's own preferred interpretation of QM involves recognizing that the relativistic version of the Schrodinger equation has solutions that imply backward travel in time. In other words, he capitalizes on the weirdness implicit in the purportedly unweird mathematics (Traditionally the "reverse" solutions are ignored.) Incidentally, Stenger argues that time-travel on a sub-atomic scale somehow doesn't even qualify as weird -- just counter-intuitive. That, apparently, is a more rational word than "weird".
Stenger repeatedly belittles alternate interpretations of QM and points out that functionally all serious interpretations are the same. This means that the interpretations he favors have no more going for them technically than the ones he derides. His objections are as much philosophical as they are scientific -- and yet thoughout the book he is contemptuous of philosophical considerations. He finds holistic hidden variables implausible but then acknowleges (very much in passing) that his time-travel variation of QM is also not accepted by most physicists. Apparently one's philosophical perspective is more important than Stenger wants to admit. He even goes so far as to say that most practicing physicists don't think at all about philosophic stuff -- so it can't be very important. That's another misrepresentation. Many, maybe most, physicists simply memorize the formalisms of their profession and contribute little to its development. The giants of QM, on the other hand, were frequently aware of and intrigued by the implications of their formalisms. John Bell, a man Stenger admires, spent his career encouraging scientists to more closely examine the assumptions of the Copenhagen interpretation -- and he made a hallmark contribution to QM because of his philosophical curiosity.
Stenger seems always on edge at the thought of holism and this leads to another of the book's repeated contradictions. His suggestion that particles from the future travel back to the past and influence the present seems pretty darned "holistic" to me. (That's not to say it couldn't be true.) Why is spatial holism metaphysical while temporal holism merely counter-intuitive? Both ideas have theoretical justifications and neither has significant empirical support. Why should only one of these theories be considered respectable? Why shouldn't both be further developed?
Decoherence is an intriguing idea but also seems to have more than a tinge of holism about it. (Sub-atomic particles, the theory says, have an existence because of each other. What collapses all those mysterious wave functions [or rather, what renders collapse unneccessary] is the interactive nature of reality itself. The theory still seems to suggest -- like its precusor interpretation, Copenhagen -- that if taken individually particles don't always precisely exist.)
Contrast Brian Greene's new book with this one. Green has a deep appreciation for De Broglie-Bohm hidden variables, while by no means accepting that the theory is on the right track. He admires decoherence but recognizes that to date it's still begging a few questions. Also consider John Gribbin's Q IS FOR QUANTUM. It's a basic, excellent and nuanced overview of the field in the form of an encyclopedia. Gribbin is fair to all serious interpretations of QM, while making his own preferences clear. He doesn't slight the partly-philosophical motivation for those preferences.
Lastly, let me again stress that the weirdness of QM is not purely, or even largely, a useless metaphysical misconception. Technicians have forced a single atom to occupy two separate places at the same moment. As Stan Lee would put it, "Nuff said."
 Does quantum theory imply mysticism? May 13, 2003
Carey Allen (San Francisco Bay Area)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Contrary to some of the other reviews, I think this is a pretty good book. Let me point out that my own background is astrophysics (undergrad) and mathematics (grad). Stenger does a creditable job of laying out the major philosophical issues of quantum theory. He has included some sidebars for the more mathematically sophisticated. My own reading left me feeling that Stenger's aim is primarily to urge readers to approach any extrapolation from quantum facts to quantum ontologies with a great deal of skepticism. Many people have construed issues of measurement to mean that 'mind' collapses wave functions. Stenger points out that 'mind' is not easily defined, is likely an emergent property of base matter, and suggests we stop reverting to Cartesian dualism every time things get confused. He discusses De Broglie and Bohm's guiding field, and points out that regardless of its correctness, it provides a viable alternative ontology, so clearly the mystical approach is not a foregone conclusion.
The book could be better. It would be nice if he spent a bit more time discussing some of the confusion regarding 'mind', but I think he has done a good job of laying out the basic issues for the well-educated lay person, and of urging skepticism before seizing upon strange phenomena as a justification for one's metaphysics.
One order of quantum physics; hold the mysticism, please. March 25, 2002
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is a great companion to Dancing Wu Li Masters. Where Dancing Wu Li Masters gives a good, somewhat mystical overview of quantum physics and the history of its development, The Unconscious Quantum shows that people who want to understand quantum physics need not resort to mysticism or Eastern philosophy. While Stenger does address mystical interpretations when summarizing the history of quantum physics, he concludes by offering a logical, consistent, non-mystical paradigm.
Stenger acknowledges that the microworld of quanta cannot be viewed in the same way as the macroworld of concrete objects that make up our everyday experience. However, if people are willing to suspend their everyday intuition and accept some very logical but unintuitive concepts, like time symmetry and decoherence, then the quantum world makes perfect sense without mastering Zen or contemplating your navel.
Stenger also shoots down the ideas of consciousness directly affecting the physical world, and faster-than-light communication between quantum particles. He explains the EPR "paradox" and other experiments which spawned these interpretations, and how they can easily be resolved using the simple but unintuitive concepts already mentioned.
The text is written for the science amateur, and requires little background knowledge, but some persistence with technical concepts (you may have to read a few parts twice to get the idea). Supporting equations are included in boxes, separate from the text. The text stands alone, but mathaholics are welcome to indulge themselves in the formulae. The first six chapters are the most technical, but it gets much easier after that, and it's definitely worth it for anbody who wants a genuine understanding of quantum physics, sans the mystical rhetoric that pervades most pop literature on the subject.
 an unsophisticated diatribe October 3, 2001
Christopher Carter (Canada)
24 out of 50 found this review helpful
Stenger sets himself up against almost all of the major figures of 20th century quantum mechanics in denying the existence of nonlocality (action at a distance). Many experiments have demonstrated nonlocality, with one of the best performed by a French team headed by Alain Aspect of the Institut d' Optique Theorique et Appliquee. Stenger admits that the team "is probably right" and then goes on to present his own dubious theory that tries to salvage every assumption of classical physics except determinisim. Stenger holds the opinion that leading theorists such as Bohm, Schrodinger, Stapp, Josephson, De Beauregard and many others are all wrong. Why doesn't he include in his book comments on his views from some of these theorists who disagree with him?His motivation for attempting to remove nonlocality from QM is clear: "At least this would put an end to mystical speculations about quantum mechanics demanding a holistic universe" (page 197). When he writes on subjects other than physics, his arguments are crude, unsophisticated, and display his ignorance. For instance, "psychic phenomena have failed to be verified after 150 years of attempts involving thousands of independent experiments." (page 289). In the first place , the first sophisticated and systematic research only goes back to 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, not 1845 (his book was written in 1995). Postive results have been consistently obtained, but they have always been discounted by critics if the protocol was not 100% perfect, thereby allowing the possibility of a 'normal' explanation - such as fraud. However, modern methods have become virtually foolproof, and combined with modern statistical techniques such as meta-analysis, they have obtained independently-replicated results with odds against chance of over ten thousand to one (see chapters 3-5 in The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, additional sources listed there). The only evidence Stenger offers for his narrow opinion is one-sentence reference to a highly-controversial 1987 report written by two arch-skeptics, psychologists Ray Hyman and James Alcock. For a balanced discussion of the Hyman-Alcock report, see Radin's book, pages 215-218. If the new age goop in the bookstores needs to be balanced by Stenger's book, then Stenger's book needs to be balanced with far more sophisticated works like Radin's. For more balanced discussions of QM, see The Mystery of the Quantum World by Euan Squires, and The Quantum World by JC Polkinghorne.
Philosophically unsophisticated and prejudiced February 8, 2001
Stenger is quite right that there is a lot of sloppy thought and unjustified claims in the popular New Age, New Paradigm movement. He is also correct to say that it is misguided to use quantum theory to justify or prove mysticism. (Not because quantum theory is incompatible with mysticism, as Stenger argues, but because science cannot and need not prove mysticism in the first place--that's what mystical contemplation is for.) Unfortunately, his criticisms are tainted by prejudice and his own sloppiness. For example, Stenger seems to lump all the fluffy New Age ideas together with the classical mystical teachings, and then indiscriminantly calls it all mysticism. For those people who really know what true mysticism is (and how to tell it apart from New Age fluff), Stenger's use of the word "mysticism" as a mere derogatory catch-all term only shows his prejudice and apparent ignorance of real mysticism. Unfortunately, this and other similar problems only serve to confuse and seriously detract from those parts of his argument that may be valid and worthy of consideration.For more unbiased and insightful books on the philosophical implications of quantum theory, I recommend: "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg, "The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr" by Niels Bohr, "The Ghost in the Atom" ed. P.C.W. Davies, "Quantum Reality" by Nick Herbert, "Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making" by Victor Mansfield, and "Choosing Reality" by B. Alan Wallace.
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