ESCAPE FROM SHADOW PHYSICS

Another in the steady stream of books aiming to explain the massive complexities of quantum theory.

Like most predecessors, MIT researcher Kay makes a valiant if not entirely successful effort. He writes that in the old classical universe, an object occupied a single location. Nothing could be in two places at the same time; matter was one phenomena and energy another. Because it seemed to make intuitive sense, it didn’t require a complicated explanation, but it turns out that we live in a quantum universe that defies such a reality. The great quantum pioneers, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, produced accurate descriptions of phenomena without revealing the mysteries, so Einstein and others insisted that quantum theory is incomplete and required deeper explanations. Kay’s hero, French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), won the 1929 Nobel Prize for his pilot-wave model demonstrating wavelike behavior of particles. According to the author, this step in the right direction was crushed by the quantum formalism of Bohr et al. De Broglie’s countrymen revived it in 2005, with experiments showing that a tiny oil bead dropped over a vibrating oil bath never coalesces but moves in a bizarre path across the surface in an analogy to the pilot-wave theory. Although generous with charts, tables, and metaphors, Kay’s description of how this makes sense may mystify readers unfamiliar with college-level physics—as is the case with many books on this subject. In the final third, the author offers numerous denunciations of the physics establishment. Metaphysics, theology, and a host of New Age theories embrace the unknowable, he writes, but science has triumphed because it attempts to describe reality. Kay also addresses the newly popular idea that “theoretical physics has completely stalled and made no progress in forty years.”

Insights into quantum theory that may flummox nonprofessionals but keep them thinking.