Robert P. Crease – författare

This book is about the ways that philosophers inquire into science. They do so with several different approaches, which this book parses into three. One analyzes the results of inquiry, another the process of inquiry, and still another inquiring, or what it means to be an inquirer. Each approach puts a different feature of science centre-stage - its logic, practice, and being-inquiring - questions it in different vocabularies for different ends, and ends up with different kinds of conclusions. This book outlines these approaches in a non-technical way, and highlights their differences by showing how they engage specific topics and issues in physics, including method, discovery, and theory. The key audiences for this book include the wider physics community, as well as philosophy and physics students.

Key Features:

The fascinating story of how quantum mechanics went mainstream

The discovery of the quantum—the idea, born in the early 1900s in a remote corner of physics, that energy comes in finite packets instead of infinitely divisible quantities—planted a rich set of metaphors in the popular imagination.

Quantum imagery and language now bombard us like an endless stream of photons. Phrases such as multiverse, quantum leap, alternate universe, the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger''s cat get reinvented continually in cartoons and movies, coffee mugs and T-shirts, and fiction and philosophy—phrases reinterpreted by each new generation of artists and writers.

Is a quantum leap big or small? How uncertain is the uncertainty principle? Is this barrage of quantum vocabulary pretentious and wacky or a fundamental shift in the way we think?

All of the above, say Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber in this groundbreaking book. The authors—one a philosopher, the other a physicist—draw on their training and six years of co-teaching to dramatize the quantum''s rocky path from scientific theory to public understanding. Together, they and their students explored missteps, mistranslations, jokes, and gibberish in public discussions of the quantum. Their book explores the quantum''s manifestations in everything from art and sculpture to the prose of John Updike and David Foster Wallace. The authors reveal the quantum''s implications for knowledge, metaphor, intellectual exchange, and the contemporary world. Understanding and appreciating quantum language and imagery, and recognizing its misuse, is part of what it means to be an educated person today.

The result is a celebration of language at the interface of physics and culture, perfect for anyone drawn to the infinite variety of ideas.