During the first half of the century, positivism had a firm hold on the great majority of physicists. It appeared, however, in recent years that this method of analysis has lost its early creativity. Professor Hooker is among the increasing number of philosophers of physics who are concerned about this situation. His determination to redirect philosophical study to significant human problems is most re freshing. Unfortunately, I am afraid that his technique does not measure up to the difficulty of this task. He polarizes the issue by formulating two comprehensive and mutually incompatible world views and then pro ceeds to destroy positivism and vindicate realism. Since he cannot discern any merit in positivism, it is hard to avoid the implication that Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg were utterly misguided when they used positivist arguments to challenge classical dogmas. Instead of analyzing his paper point by point, I prefer to discuss the problem from my point of view. Let me start by clarifying first how I intend to use the terms 'real' and 'reality'. Curiously, the commonsense usage serves as a good point of departure. We usually know what 'reality' means in contrast to 'dream', 'illusion', 'deception' or 'error'. We know how to compare a photograph or a map with reality. There are situations in physics which are quite similar. We distinguish a real object from a hologram, and we know how to tell a 'real' effect from an experimental error, at least in the long run.
By questioning the validity of some of our basic concepts, such as space, object, and causality, quantum physics contributes quite decisively to the dramatic changes now taking place in our world picture.This book is addressed not only to physicists at an early stage in their careers (the first or second year graduate student) but also to philosophers, as well as to all the senior physicists interested in the interpretation problem. Beginning with a chapter that could be described as ?philosophy for physicists,? it presents an in-depth analysis of present-day quantum mechanical concepts, an analysis of physicists and philosophers alike. Specifically, it first offers an extensive critical analysis of such topics as the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen reality criterion, nonseparatability, the quantum measurement riddle, decoherence theory, consistent histories approaches and ontologically interpretable theories. All this then naturally leads to philosophical questions concerning, in particular, intersubjective agreement and the limit of realism. And a thorough examination of this whole material finally leads to the view that distinguishing between empirical reality and a veiled man-independent reality yields an acceptable answer to the perplexing question of how to interpret quantum physics. Veiled Reality offers nonspecialists, including students in physics, philosophy and the history of science, an accessible perspective on basic problems in the foundations of physics.
Remote viewing experiments suggest that information can get across space in ways that Newtonian physicists would say was impossible. In 1905 an engineer in a Swiss patent office created a theory which stood science on its head. Space was the emptiness between things and time was an unvarying beat which remained exactly the same everywhere in the universe. Einstein’s theory was called the Special Theory of Relativity, and it began physics on its way towards understanding the idea that mind can influence matter. Einstein retained a very simple approach to things. He was obsessed with the nature of reality, but he also had an elegantly logical mind, and so was not prepared to accept unquestioningly his view of the world about him as being either real or the same for everyone else.