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I am glad you liked it. I would definitely like to read more by Becker in the future.

He's done a terrific job here of pulling everything together. Very impressed.

I'm just reading the intro. What a lucky coincidence Hamlet is set in Denmark. It almost feels like Shakespeare presaged the Copenhagen interpretation.

Please write the short review of it for me

°¿°ù³Üç wrote: "Please write the short review of it for me"

Me too, me too! Manny, the quill for hire :)

°¿°ù³Üç wrote: "Please write the short review of it for me"

"Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen? Get real."

Matt wrote: "I'm just reading the intro. What a lucky coincidence Hamlet is set in Denmark. It almost feels like Shakespeare presaged the Copenhagen interpretation."

Sometimes those time-travelers really get a bit careless, don't they?

Manny wrote: "Sometimes those time-travelers really get a bit careless, don't they?"

That's the danger of quantum wine. Too much of it and you're tunneling through the centuries.

I love human he makes the scientists. Bell sounds just like a really nice guy.

I can't believe how badly treated some of the students/postdocs who worked on Quantum Ontology. It reminds me a lot of the attitude people used to have towards the study of consciousness in psychology/neuroscience in the 1980s (though in retrospect perhaps the later was more deserved).

Yes, I also loved his portrait of Bell. It crossed my mind to wonder if he was one of the people on whom Le Guin's Shevek is based.

Scientists are pretty mean to anyone who strays outside the accepted orthodoxy of the day. It is rather incredible to see how much of it is sociological. Any unbiased observer would surely say that Bell's Theorem is well-grounded hard science and string theory is fantastic speculation; but somehow the string theorists have been treated as mainstream for decades, while Bell had to keep quiet about what he was doing.

We had a CERN nuclear physicist to dinner last night. I asked him if he knew people who'd known Bell. He was unsure about who Bell was and couldn't remember what his theorem said. And he's very good - he's had several papers published in Nature and is generally a supersmart guy. Apparently Bell's Theorem just isn't something people talk about much in the QM mainstream.

We had a CERN nuclear physicist to dinner last night. I asked him if he knew people who'd known Bell. He was unsure about who Bell was and couldn't remember what his theorem said. And he's very good - he's had several papers published in Nature and is generally a supersmart guy. Apparently. Bell's Theorem just isn't something people talk about much in the QM mainstream.

That's crazy. I remember talking about Bell's Theorem when I was doing first year university physics in the early 1980s in Melbourne (I was sort of nerdy back then).

These sorts of foundational questions just seem like good places to go if you want to do foundational physics.

My understanding is that Bell's Theorem is very important to theory but not to practice, unless perhaps you're doing quantum cryptography. After all, it does basically just say that QM works the way it's supposed to. It's odd that that there was all this resistance to testing it.

Bravo, Manny, well done. As a (retired) psychologist and active medium, I have found myself greatly attracted to quantum theory and its applications to the nature of reality. Becker's book sounds like one I want to read.

Thank you Charles! As you see, I thought it was a terrific book, and it's the first one I've read which confronts the questions head-on: what does quantum mechanics say about the nature of reality, and why are most published accounts so extremely evasive and unhelpful?

Terrific review Manny but I wanted to hear more about the sexy Sociologists ;)

Thank you Jaidee! And if you're looking for information about sexy sociologists of science, you might want to check out Feyerabend's autobiography, Killing Time. It's amazing and takes an afternoon to read.

Thank you Manuel!

IMHO, the issue with Physics nowadays is that it has become a masturbatory exercise.

Oh, I don't believe that's a correct characterisation at all! If physics were sex, then I think the majority of physicists would unfortunately be high-priced escorts. Quite a few would be in happy but slightly dull marriages. But yes, if you're thinking of string theorists, I'm sure there would be a lot of tasteless self-love jokes going round...

(I'm just echoing what I hear from our physicist friends...)

Added to my read list, though I think it will have to be discounted from its present $20, which is real enough to me even in fiat money.

Trust me, it's worth more than a large Ultimate Cheese Lover's Pizza, a garlic bread and a Coke.

You definitely sold me on The Dispossessed part. Looks like a great read.

The author told me he didn't consciously base his portrait of Bell on Shevek, but now he wonders if he didn't at least in part do it without realising.

You might love reading Mindful Universe by Henry Stapp a Berkeley Physicist. Do check it out. I'd like to see your review of that book.

I am suspicious of these accounts of QM which make consciousness an essential part of the picture - but it sounds like he has done one of the best ones, so I guess I should check it out! Thanks.

Manny: Check out this cool visualization of Pilot-Wave Theory:

I have to take a little issue with one point of your review: you treat "what is real?" as though it were a meaningful question - as though, indeed, it were a question at all.

To the extent that philosophers in the middle of the century left the question to physicists, its because philosophers quite correctly had come to realise that it is something that only looks like a question through an accident of syntax (this was realised in the late 19th century, but it took at least 50 years for philosophers as a whole to accept it). Or at least, many people have attempted to give the 'question' some meaning, but have continually failed - in part because their answers (their questions, rather) have been found vacuous, and in part because whenever they give a question/answer, a fleshing out of what they thought they meant, that has some solidity to it, they invariably find all the other realists queueing up to say no, that's not what they meant at all. It's a Lewis Carroll question: they ask "what is real?", you give an answer, and they say no, you've clearly misunderstood how the question was intended - because, at heart, they intended the question to have no answer.

Of course, that's a bit out of date regarding philosophy: since 1970 or so, professional philosophers have realised that normal people won't keep paying them to answer The Big Questions if they keep pointing out that The Big Questions are meaningless, so now there are whole departments dedicating to counting each type of angel on each type of pinhead.

"Real" and "meaning" are the "temporary liquidity problem" and "multi-level marketing" of cogitative hucksters...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But all the same, it is often useful to ask whether things are real or not - otherwise the word wouldn't be used so often. For example, it seems that COVID-19 was real, and not a Dem hoax. Phlogiston and the luminiferous aether turned out not to be real. And no one is really sure if the wavefunction is real, but I don't think that asking the question is silly.

But there you're talking not about reality, but about which claims are true and which aren't. If that's what you mean by 'real', there's hardly a need for a book - just a list.

But this approach is disingenuous, because when people ask "yes, but is the wave function really real?" they don't mean it in this sort of usual, truth-based sense. They're not asking whether or not the theory will be disproven or rendered inelegant, as happened to the case of the aether, the phlogiston, and the caloric fluid, and the island of California - they're generally saying that even if the theory can't be disproven, they still doubt something in a way that goes beyond material evidence or modeling. This is a different sort of doubt that only arises in philosophical discussions, and that has no actual consequences.

In any case, I don't think your examples are really that valid anyway, and to some extent show the limitations (or bizarreness) of this "reality" of yours. Let's imagine, for instance, that covid were a hoax. Would it then not be real? Well, if something is not real, it doesn't exist - it doesn't have any effect in the world, you can't see signs of it [except, of course, that in the case of philosophical doubts like the doubt of minds or the doubt of things in themselves or the doubt of waveforms, the 'doubter' is happy to acknowledge even that tthey CAN see signs and effects. Making one wonder, as Wisdom said, what it is that they are really doubting, and whether they truly doubt at all].

But clearly, for us to label something a hoax, we must have heard of it. We can't say "this theory is a hoax!" if neither the theory nor the hoax exist. If there is no real hoax, covid cannot really be a hoax; if covid is a hoax, there must be a real hoax. But if the hoax is real, and covid is that hoax, then covid itself must be real.

[is this a sophistical play on words? Perhaps - but that's the point. "Real" is constantly subject to these word-games precisely because it has no real function to ground it. "Real" is only ever a word game...]

So when people say "covid isn't real, it's a hoax!", they are not disputing that there is some thing called 'covid' - they're just debating the nature of that thing. Contrariwise, when people say "covid isn't a hoax, it's real!", they're not just informing us that there is just a thing as covid, they're telling us something about covid - they're describing a property, and if something isn't real, how can it have any real property?

"Real" in this 'fake news' sense simple means something along the lines of 'not a hoax'. It's a claim not about ontology, but about the presence or absence of fraud. In this sense we can talk about, for instance, certain results in physics papers being 'real' or 'not real'. But I don't think anyone is claiming that quantum physics as a whole is simply a hoax...


Then again, with phlogiston, I'm not sure how it can be called non-real. Clearly, there is something that acts (more or less) the way that the theorised phlogiston would act - we have simply changed the name we use for it from "phlogiston" to "the absence of oxygen". Phlogiston theory and oxygen theory are effectively the same, with different labels used for things. Phlogiston theory is deprecated, because alongside the rest of chemistry it's a poinlessly baroque way of naming things. But given that phlogiston is simply the absence of oxygen, and clearly the absence of oxygen in some places is real, how can phlogiston not be real? You may as well say that night is not real (it's only the absence of day), or heat is not real (it's only the absence of coldness). If you go down that road, you're deep into the mire of sophistry!

So in this case, "phlogiston is not real" generally only really means "phlogiston is a longwinded way to talk about things" or "phlogiston is a deprecated manner of speech" - but people who say that the waveform is not really real are not simply saying they think the theory is old-fashioned or cumbersome.

Even in the case of the aether: look, here is a pear. Is this pear not the luminiferous aether? You say: no, the aether has such-and-such characteristics, which the pear does not have, so the pear is not the aether. I say: if the aether is not real, how can you say it has this or that property, and does not have such and such another property? Perhaps, I say, people who theorised the luminiferous aether were correct that it existed, but they were simply wrong about some of its predicted properties - such as, they failed to predict that it was in fact a pear. Or, alternatively, the aether is real but is simply the space-time continuum - the theories simply ascribed it the wrong properties. Because once you bring in the 'real' concept, you can't distinguish between talking about something that isn't real, and talking about soemthing that is real but being mistaken about some property of it. If I say "I think there's a tower in London called The Shard that's 400m tall", am I talking accurately about a building that in fact isn't real, or inaccurately about a building that in fact is real?

So should we say "California is real; it simply turned out not to be an island"? Or should we say "California turned out not to be real. But an area of America was subsequently named after it"? [Likewise, must we say "the islands Columbus was looking for weren't real", or "the islands Columbus was looking for were real, but their identity with the Indies was not real", or "the islands were real and they were really the Indies, but the unity of the Indies was not real, as there turned out two be two sets of them?]

There doesn't seem to be any well-grounded way to insist on one or the other of these claims, and you'll find both of them in respectable history books. But if 'being real' is a real thing, and a very important thing it would seem, shouldn't the bare minimum we expect of it be that we can say of each thing whether it is real or not - or at least say what concrete evidence would settle the matter for us?

Once you start talking about "reality", paradoxes spring up everywhere, and so do unanswerable questions - we are again and again confronted with seemingly arbitrary and unmotivated choices whether things are defined as 'real' or 'not real'.

And that's before we get into questions like "is the bicycle I bought ten years ago still real, even though I've changed all the parts?" and "is this heap still real now that I have removed half the grains?" and all the other classic wordgames that spring inexorably from the phantasm of the "real".


Now, if, on the other hand, you say "there's no point talking about the luminiferous aether in physics - that's a mode of speech with no great use outside of discussions about history" - now that's very concrete and instructive, and of practical significance. It rules out immediately such suggestions as "the luminiferous aether is the space-time continuum" or "the luminiferous aether is Belgium". It also rules out the suggestion "the luminiferous aether is not real", but that doesn't seem to be much of a loss.

Likewise, if we say "it's no good talking about California as an island, outside of discussions about the history of exploration (or sociological metaphor) - it's not a concept modern geographers use". I understand what that means. It's a useful practical guide, and rules out a whole bunch of fruitless sophistical debates.

But the philosophical skeptics are not (usually) saying "we shouldn't talk about other minds" or "we shouldn't talk about waveforms". They're happy to talk about them, but just want everything caveated with "but they're not, you know, real". Except, I'm afraid, that I don't know. I don't know what this caveat is meant to accomplish in practical terms, as it's not what's meant by usual, day-to-day uses of 'real' - after all, normally to dismiss something as not real indicates we don't need to worry about it! - and it's not the same sort of thing that we ordinarily mean by 'doubt'.

I'm really not sure what it's for.

I think you are too ready to abandon the commonsense position that "being real" is a meaningful and useful term. When we compare the rival claims "COVID-19 is a hoax" and "COVID-19 is real" and try to determine which one is more appropriate, there are clear criteria. If it had been a hoax, few people would have got sick and died, and we could have dismissed it as media hysteria created for political ends. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case: COVID-19 is real, there is a highly infectious virus that is killing many people.

Similarly, with phlogiston, I think it's a post hoc construction to equate "phlogiston" with "absence of oxygen". Phlogiston was supposed to be a substance, which was stored in materials like wood and coal and escaped under appropriate circumstances to create heat and light. It turned out that there was no such substance: you could call it a natural philosopher hoax. I think it's a useful shorthand to say "phlogiston wasn't real".

The question of whether the wave function is real or not is IMHO quite subtle. It's easy to say that there are no observable effects, so it's meaningless, but I am not sure this is true. If it's real, and the MWI is valid (these claims often go together, though maybe they don't have to), then quantum suicide experiments will give different results for the experimenter. It's certainly not impossible that other things could be different too.

On thinking about it more: the claim that anything is "real", as opposed to being a hoax, an idea, a speculation, a story etc is certainly a very bold one, and it is indeed less than clear that it necessarily means anything. As Plato (and others) pointed out a long time ago, we shouldn't expect "reality" to be anything like what we currently imagine it is, but it may still be there if we just look for it with sufficient dedication. And yes, it's a bit difficult to say what "reality" is, but one might consider it a description of the world which even after a great deal of close examination doesn't just turn out to be some kind of story.

This is indeed a lot to hope for, given that all previous accounts of the world have turned out to be no more than stories, but it's been a fruitful program: by pursuing it, we have discovered many things we never even dreamed of, and the stories are becoming more solid. You see many physicists who understand these things (Feynman, Weinberg...) arguing that at some point, perhaps fairly soon, the stories will no longer need to be revised and updated as new information comes in. Then we will arguably have identified what "reality" is. Of course, we won't necessarily have any way of knowing that we've got there. But the converse position, that there is no description of the world that fits exactly, also seems counterintuitive - even though this is also an extremely respectable position among modern physicists, who only want to claim the validity of theories up to a maximum energy scale determined by the theory.