Quantum Mechanics and Experience / Edition 1

by David Z Albert

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674741133
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/15/1994
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Z Albert is Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, Time and Chance, and After Physics. His writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals of physics and philosophy, as well as in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American.

Table of 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

What People are Saying About This

Jeffrey Bub

This is a wholly original, engaging, and provocative work on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, written in David Albert's inimitable style.
— Jeffrey Bub, University of Maryland

Frank Arntzenius

A lively, lucid, elementary, yet deeply challenging account. The layperson and seasoned philosopher and scientist alike could do no better in their attempts to get out of the quantum muddle than to read this book.
— Frank Arntzenius, University of Southern California

Editorial Reviews

Over the past two decades, philosophers of physics have worked long and hard…to extract the philosophical pith from the theoretical physics. There are now a number of excellent books which explain the issues at a reasonably advanced level to non-physicists. Albert’s is among the best of the bunch.

Times Literary Supplement - David Papineau

This is a wholly original, engaging, and provocative work on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, written in David Albert’s inimitable style.

Jeffrey Bub

A lively, lucid, elementary, yet deeply challenging account. The layperson and seasoned philosopher and scientist alike could do no better in their attempts to get out of the quantum muddle than to read this book.

Frank Arntzenius

Over the past two decades, philosophers of physics have worked long and hard...to extract the philosophical pith from the theoretical physics. There are now a number of excellent books which explain the issues at a reasonably advanced level to non-physicists. Albert's is among the best of the bunch.
— David Papineau

Times Literary Supplement

Albert (philosophy, Columbia U.) explains the foundations of quantum mechanics at a level comprehensible to anyone with high- school level mathematics, yet explores some of the most recent advances. The basic problem, he says, is measurement, and he reviews some of the attempts to solve it. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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