Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, An Excursion into Metaphysics...and the Meaning of Reality Book

Ride the particulate waveform, sweet universe of mine.

How our human consciousnesses perceive reality at the subphenomenal level makes for a truly extraordinary conundrum, and Herbert is an appreciably lucid and patient explicator of this primordial soup of uncertainty brought to our awarenesses through the mathematics, theorizing, and testing of many of the most brilliant physicists of the past century and a half. Even more so than other elucidators like the late Heinz Pagels, John Gribbin, and Brian Greene, Herbert comes the closest to allowing a layperson to wrap their heads around how it is, exactly, that Quantum Mechanics has driven these same scientific lawgivers and architects to the point of breakdown with its paradoxical formations and uncanny peculiarities, seemingly irreconcilable to the logical parameters that we have come to both assume and require through our own existence embedded within the natural world. What's more, he eschews the lame pop-culture analogies that so often lead one to grit one's teeth or cauliflower-cook from one's ears with two of those aforementioned peers.

Above all, Herbert constructs his work to stress, and subsequently elaborate upon, the central point that elementary particles'for which he interchangeably uses his self-coined terms Quons and Quantumstuff'whether constituting energy or matter, display particle behavior when being measured, and a wave formation when not; with the latter, of necessity, requiring that whenever one dynamic aspect of a quons' particle form is being determined, its conjugate aspect will prove impossible to pin down with a similar accuracy due to a continually elevating uncertainty attending to that specific quality; and that, when said quon is not under some manner of measurement, it exists as a wavelike element of fluxing probabilities that, paradoxically, concurrently displays all the possible attributes possible for any particular aspect that a physicist could undertake to quantify'regardless of time, space, or momentum. Indeed, as Herbert explains in a particularly startling example, the act of observation can apparently influence even the stellar pathway of photons emitted from a quasar several billion years ago'a stretching of the subphenomenal proxy-wave probability across an incomprehensible immensity of light-years. At such a moment'the absurdity of the contention notwithstanding'it certainly does seem that the very act of our being a conscious observer undertakes to determine, in a particular moment, the constituted reality of that very element of the universe; that said light beam's existence comprised a murky, ghostly ephemerality of possible states until our measuring gaze forced upon it the necessity of making a determination, of collapsing the wave function to the degree that it particulated in space-time with the very attributes we discover when we brought it to bear in such an enigmatic fashion.

In order to set the stage properly, the author spends a great deal of time in carefully elaborating upon the composition and behavior of waves'whether sine, impulse, spherical'their periodicity and phase, their frequency and amplitude, at how the latter affects their inherent energy (at the material real level) or probability (at the quantum configuration level). Especially important is the quality of disturbance generated when waves impact each other, and in which their energy/probability is either augmented, diminished, or maintained depending upon the congruencies in the temporal and spatial attributes they share at the moment of confluence. There is also the mysterious property of Phase Entanglement, in which, when any two quons engage and disengage with each other, their amplitudes separate but their phases remain entangled; this mixed phase attribution resonates with each quon from that point forward'a property that might perhaps point, through such as Bell's Theorem, towards a superluminal information exchange between these particles, though they be separated by hundreds of light years. A feature of particular usefulness for experimental measurement is the determination by mathematicians and physicists that any wave function can be said to be made up of, and thus capable of being broken down into, a wide variety of individual wave shapes'including their conjugate opposites'and which fact, combined with the use of analysis or synthesis prisms to separate/combine these individual forms from/into the constituent whole, can be used to measure whatever attributes of a quon can be held to be represented by that(those) particular waveform(s). The fact that the conjugate waves can never be realized at a 1:1 level with their antithesis demonstrates the reality that the precise measurement of two such opposing quantum-level aspects'as, for instance, position and momentum'cannot be determined in coevality. Thus, subphenomenal uncertainty is proven mathematically, and the paradox and puzzle of such a bedrock to nature given a rigor that scientists have so far found impossible to escape from or reconcile with, absent the bizarre scenarios they have concocted to explain the unexplainable.

For this is the crux of the matter from the authorial perspective'to allow the reader to get a handle upon how, exactly, the physicists themselves have come to order this molecular level of elementary reality, one which deals in measurements so unfathomably small as to defy any manner of mental purchase. Since the phenomenal level can be well-understood with classical methodologies and terminologies, physicists would prefer to extend such to the quantumstuff underlying it; since, apart from the actual measurements, this has proven exceedingly problematic, there have developed eight primary schools of thought about Quantum Reality and how to address its wispily heavy presence as the shimmery white elephant in the room.

Quantum Reality #1 & #2: This is the Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr and its later-derived, Observer-Promoted adjunct, which holds that there is no underlying subphenomenal reality to discover; instead, we have elementary particles at the quantum level in an undefined state of fluctuating and concurrent probabilities; it is our act of observation that forces a wave function collapse and assigns a measured value to these properties. This determined value had no existence, or meaning, until a measurement created a tangible value out of a sea of possibilities. Whether atoms really exist, pondering the structure of the quantum world'such is but idle speculation, irrelevant to the quantifications imparted by observational imposition.

Quantum Reality #3: The Whole Worlds theory, which maintains that there is no dissociative distinction between the phenomenal and subphenomenal worlds, as the quantum attributes are not localized with the quon but are rather an inherent part of the experimental arrangement. The phase entanglement mentioned above is a primary component of this theory, in which it is plausible that the majority of quons carry wave phase remembrances of their past collisions in the dawning days of the universe.

Quantum Reality #4: This is the infamous Many-Worlds theory, primarily developed by Everett under the auspices of Wheeler. This beauty avoids many of the paradoxes and pratfalls associated with the particulate uncertainties and wave functions with a whopper all of its own: whenever a measurement forces a value to be assigned to any dynamic value of a quon, every possible option is realized, a free-for-all made possible by the assignation of a brand new parallel universe arising out of each and every quantum value implementation. Our human minds, delimited to sensory perceptions in our own space-time, cannot perceive this exponential proliferation of fully-formed universes, blossoming under the imposition of every available attribute value allowable to each and every particle; but there they are, expanding rapid-fire like the zits on a soda-chugging teenager under the cascading avalanche of observations that are brought to bear.

Quantum Reality #5: An intriguing offering that places itself about halfway between #s 3 and 6, but states that we need an entirely new branch of logic, superimposed upon a Boolean framework, that will allow us to grasp and bring within the limits of our human understanding the actual nature of the alien quantum world. Using as an example the peculiar quantum properties of photon polarization, Herbert delineates a mathematical logic that endeavors to penetrate the walled mysteries that have so far repulsed us, weaving lattices of quantum logic that will allow us (partial) egress after clambering these probability-permeated barriers.

Quantum Reality #6: The favored purview of so-called realist physicists like Einstein and the Copenhagen apostate Bohm. This position, called Neorealism, attempts to salvage as much of the classical stability as is possible for the quantum realm. The neorealists hold that atoms exist, that quons have properties, that the wave functions are of the Schrödinger form and do not collapse upon measurement. Diametrically opposed to the Copenhagen majority, the fatal flaw in the Neorealist position is the juggling they have to perform to account for the almost perfect accuracy of Quantum Mechanics, including the necessity for waves and particles to communicate with each other at superluminal speeds'a thing utterly forbidden by the Special Relativity of this very school's chief proponent.

Quantum Reality #7: Developed initially by the rigorous mathematical mind of John von Neumann, this is the school of the Conscious Observer, a sort of idealist kin for the scientific field. Von Neumann, and his ilk, deem that the only reality is quantumstuff, of which everything in the universe is composed. It is the act of measurement that is the deciding factor in the wave function collapse that causes the Quantum Jump, the imposition of a single reality from the sea of waveform possibilities'but the powerful math of von Neumann showed that this measurement could be initiated anywhere in the von Neumann chain that bound the stages of the event. Taking note that the only unique variable in this chain was human consciousness, von Neumann thus determined that existent reality is created by the conscious mind. There is an actual reality, but it can only be in conjunction with a consciousness that can force a fact from probability through the act of observation.

Quantum Reality #8: Finally, Herbert offers up the theory established primarily by the great Heisenberg, whose self-named Uncertainty Principle is one of the foundational theorems of Quantum Mechanics. Heisenberg proffers a duality-riven single world, composed of the potentiality implicit within the quantumstuff waveforms, and the actuality present after the wave function has collapsed in order to accommodate a measurement. In other words, when nobody is looking, the universe is a soup of probability'only to convert to an existing, quantified reality when focus is brought to bear upon what had priorly been a mere bundle of promise. Theoretically capable of extending itself all the way backwards to the initializing Big Look from the singularly Big Guy, Heisenberg's QR is one where there is an omnipresent sense of something lurking just out of vision at the corner of one's eye.

The final section of this excellent book is the prep-work and subsequent walk-through by Herbert in order to impart upon the reader all of the implicit potentialities held within one Bell's Theorem, a probing of the famous EPR paradox crafted by Einstein and Co. in order to challenge the regnancy of a Quantum Mechanics that deeply troubled the genius of Relativity. By means of a construct that measures the polarization of twinned-photons by splitting them at varying angles with a rotated crystal and projecting these binary polarizations onto a phosphor screen, a somewhat obscure Northern Irish physicist named John Bell made the stunning determination that reality is non-local. In other words, though our phenomenal world operates at the local level'diminishing with distance, shielded, coterminous, subluminal'reality, the quantum bedrock, is non-local: undiminished with distance, unshielded, incongruent, superluminal. What's more, Bell's Theorem has subsequently been proven mathematically, meaning its truth no longer relies on the viability of Quantum Theory: it is a reality of it own. Herbert uses this perturbing discovery to realign the eight schools of Quantum Reality and work out how it impacts them all, especially in its potential links to that weirdest of quantum bunnies, Phase Entanglement.

Three stars only because Herbert, while proving himself a highly competent guide, writes with a workmanlike prose, and can occasionally get a bit bogged down, ironically most often by trying to make complicated mathematics explicable to the general reader. Tantalizing with its glimpses of the potential for faster-than-light communication and movement, whilst simultaneously dampening with its allusions to the all-too-likelihood that such communications would be at a level comprehensible only to nature itself, and, alas, not to the human consciousness that, as this book shows over and again, despite being profoundly confounded by the subatomic world it has uncovered, refuses to leave it be without having done everything possible to make some manner of sense of it all.