The former paints the historical context while the latter dives into the science. The book mostly ignores this.Īs such, Adam Becker’s What Is Real? which came out earlier in the same year is a perfect companion to Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden. Quantum mechanics is a very young science, developed extremely quickly (most of the fundamentals having been laid down in the span of two decades) with twisted, colourful history full of fascinating characters. If you get it, you’re genuinely close to really getting it and if you don’t get it, you at least know. Popular explanations of scientific topics often resort to similes that seem to provide an understanding, but leave the audience confused on the underlying issues, building wrong intuitions instead of a coherent picture. It goes right up to the maths wall, but it doesn’t cross it. Moreover, Something Deeply Hidden tries to impart as much genuine understanding as is possible without dealing with complex numbers and matrix calculations. One who is willing to pause and think, maybe re-read a paragraph or two. It does call for an attentive reader, however. You don’t need to be versed in QM, physics or even maths to be able to follow it. It is a breath of fresh air to hear some definite answers in the field that’s commonly so muddled. What you decide for lunch has no fundamental effect on the shape of the universe. The act of 'observing' is simply an entanglement of (what we perceive as) a particle with the measuring equipment and its environment. QM has almost certainly nothing to do with your thought processes (other than the driving all the underlying chemistry that is). There’s nothing special about an observer and absolutely nothing special about consciousness (from the QM point of view). Things aren’t a particle and a wave at the same time.

This book cuts right through the bullshit, focusing on what we know, why we know it, what we don’t know and what are we doing about it. You hear people talk about QM with such an air of mystery, there’s no wonder charlatans like Deepak Chopra take hold in the confusion. What is the nature of the observer? Why is everything a both a wave and a particle? How is the can both alive and dead at the same time? Why the divide between the quantum realm and our everyday reality? And where does human consciousness come into all this? Most approaches focus on the utter weirdness, elevating our misled intuitions and ignorance to a mysticism.

I wish my first introduction to Quantum Mechanics was with this book. This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later with next to no spell/grammar checking. Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll - Aimlessly Going Forward Aimlessly Going Forward

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