Synchronicity
The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect
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- US$16.99
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From Aristotle's Physics to quantum teleportation, learn about the scientific pursuit of instantaneous connections in this insightful examination of our world.
For millennia, scientists have puzzled over a simple question: Does the universe have a speed limit? If not, some effects could happen at the same instant as the actions that caused them -- and some effects, ludicrously, might even happen before their causes. By one hundred years ago, it seemed clear that the speed of light was the fastest possible speed. Causality was safe. And then quantum mechanics happened, introducing spooky connections that seemed to circumvent the law of cause and effect. Inspired by the new physics, psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli explored a concept called synchronicity, a weird phenomenon they thought could link events without causes. Synchronicity tells that sprawling tale of insight and creativity, and asks where these ideas -- some plain crazy, and others crazy powerful -- are taking the human story next.
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Physicist Halpern (The Quantum Labyrinth) makes a valiant if not fully successful attempt to render quantum mechanics accessible. Halpern surveys the human search to understand the cosmos, beginning with the ancient Greeks' interest in the speed of light, through Newton and his classical model of particles and James Clerk Maxwell's theories of electromagnetics. Halpern then leaps to the early 20th century, when Einstein's theories jump-started quantum physics. He gives the most famous names in modern physics their due including, in addition to Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr but focuses on the lesser-known Wolfgang Pauli, known to contemporaries as Zweistein, or "Einstein II" for intellectual innovations such as statistical causality: the idea that to account for randomness in the behavior of subatomic particles, scientists can only determine cause and effect by averaging the results of many experiments together. Particularly intriguing is a section on how the friendship between Pauli and Carl Jung influenced both men's thinking. On the details of quantum mechanics, though, he gives little quarter, with dense sentences such as "Finally, physical observables, such as the measurable energy of electron's transition between different atomic levels that produces a spectral line, might be represented by scalars." It's daunting subject matter, and even those with a general interest in science may have trouble making their wy through Halpern's intelligent treatise.
