Escape From Shadow Physics
On sale
6th March 2025
Price: £12.99
Genre
The received wisdom in quantum physics is that, at the deepest levels of reality, there are no actual causes for atomic events. This idea led to the outlandish belief that quantum objects – indeed, reality itself – aren’t real unless shaped by human measurement. Einstein mocked this idea, asking whether his bed spread out across his room unless he looked at it. And yet it remains one of the most influential ideas in science and our culture.
In Escape from Shadow Physics, Adam Forrest Kay takes up Einstein’s torch: reality isn’t mysterious or dependent on human measurement, but predictable and independent of us. At the heart of his argument is groundbreaking research with little drops of oil. These droplets behave as particles do in the long-overlooked quantum theory of pilot waves; crucially, they display quantum behaviour while being described by classical physics.
What if the original doubters of our quantum orthodoxy (not least Einstein himself) were onto something? What if pilot wave theory was right all along? In that case, our whole story of twentieth-century physics is topsy-turvy and we must give up the idea that reality is simply too weird to grasp. Weird it may still be, but a true understanding of nature now seems within our reach.
In Escape from Shadow Physics, Adam Forrest Kay takes up Einstein’s torch: reality isn’t mysterious or dependent on human measurement, but predictable and independent of us. At the heart of his argument is groundbreaking research with little drops of oil. These droplets behave as particles do in the long-overlooked quantum theory of pilot waves; crucially, they display quantum behaviour while being described by classical physics.
What if the original doubters of our quantum orthodoxy (not least Einstein himself) were onto something? What if pilot wave theory was right all along? In that case, our whole story of twentieth-century physics is topsy-turvy and we must give up the idea that reality is simply too weird to grasp. Weird it may still be, but a true understanding of nature now seems within our reach.
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Reviews
Energetically written in short chapters interspersed with digressions into other episodes of scientific wrongturnings, ESCAPE FROM SHADOW PHYSICS is consistently interesting . . . Mr. Kay rightly highlights the limitations of current physics
Artfully written . . . Kay's knowledge of physics history is exquisite . . . ESCAPE FROM SHADOW PHYSICS offers a splendid history of classical and quantum physics as well as a convincing exposition of hydrodynamic quantum analogues
A singular addition to the popular literature on quantum interpretations
Adam Kay has written a book that lays out with great clarity the central issue in modern physics: are quantum-mechanical probabilities quite different in nature from all the others in physics and life? The reader will enjoy fascinating details from a great sweep of history and Kay's skill in explaining key technical facts with enviable simplicity
Precise and seductive . . . I could gladly spend a year - or at least an academic semester - with this book
Adam Forrest Kay has accomplished a real tour de force: he has covered almost the entire history of science to illustrate the failure of instrumentalist or positivist approaches. This leads him to a radical critique of the current dominant view of quantum physics, known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Kay's critique is based in part on the pilot-wave theory and the hydrodynamic quantum analogues. This book will be a landmark in the history and philosophy of physics
Reads like a novel, in which the biographies of major physical concepts are intertwined with the biographies of the great minds that shaped them. The reader will be surprised by the clarity of Kay's arguments
In the bouncing groove of an oil droplet, Adam Forrest Kay finds a new way to look at quantum mechanics - one that replaces randomness and mystery with new knowledge. Supported by a brilliantly told history and philosophy of physics, this book will change how you think about the field's past. And it may just set a new path for its future
Whatever you think of Kay's efforts to overturn the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and to justify Einstein by re-establishing classical norms of causality and determinism, his history of the whole wave/particle debate from ancient Greece onwards is authoritative and encyclopaedic - and intriguingly suggests that the purely scientific arguments were in part outweighed by an element of the straightforwardly human
Fascinating and rather beautiful . . . Physicists want their objective, real world back. Adam Forrest Kay shows that there might be one way they can have it
Adam Kay has written a rollicking account of the history of science - and human intellectual folly. Rare in its irreverence towards the hallowed ground of quantum foundations, Escape from Shadow Physics is a must-read for quantum dissidents