Quantum Sense and Nonsense

Lee Billings

Philip Moriarty

To say that I eagerly anticipated the arrival of my review copy of Jean Bricmont’s latest book, Quantum Sense and Nonsense , would be an understatement approaching “we physicists have maybe got one or two loose ends to tie up when it comes to interpreting quantum mechanics” proportions.

Alireza Doostdar

Kit Pedler

Physics, to most people, is a completely commonsense, logical and rational subject. Self-confidence in everyday life depends absolutely on the senses, so there is no use asking us to give them up unless there is an absolutely overwhelming need to do so. The new physics has revealed such a magnificently absurd structure to the world about us, that our commonsense mind and its senses cannot possibly appreciate it as a simple, visual, tactile, mechanical picture. The old, or Newtonian, physics believed the universe to be one of predictable, commonsense certainty. Heavenly bodies moved with a magnificent and ponderous evenness; the behaviour of large objects and things seemed to be perfectly understood. All science consists of making models, to see then what fits into the model and what fails to do so.

Matthew Daniell

Discrete time has, rightly, not generally been taken very seriously with the standard conceptual framework for understanding reality. I say ‘rightly’ only because when fully understood, discrete time seems like nonsense or an impossibility from the perspective of our common sense experience of time. Yet perhaps the standard conceptual framework which is assumed is incorrect. In this paper I will outline an understanding of the nature of time which demands a questioning of reductionism and therefore challenges this framework, and claim it is an inadequate conceptual framework for describing and understanding reality. In particular, I outline here from empirical observation how the phenomena of Quantum Entanglement can support a conceptually irreducible reality.