“The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality” from Sander Bais
There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement.
Enrico Fermi
If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.
Quantum Physics is the solid basis of most of our understanding of nature and has been the driver of many technological advances.
The trilogy “Power of the Invisible: The Quintessence of Reality” gives a coherent account of this huge domain of knowledge, which is linked to some fifty Nobel prizes and is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century. This quantum story follows three lines in parallel: a pictorial, an explanatory and a mathematical one.
Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
This book is available for download from Amsterdam University Press
If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.
Niels Bohr
Sander Bais is a well-known theoretical physicist from the University of Amsterdam and was a long-time external faculty member of the Sante Fe Institute.
We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
Niels Bohr (addressing Wolfgang Pauli)
Review by SFI External Professor J. Doyne Farmer
The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality (University of Amsterdam Press, April 15, 2024), a three-volume set written by former SFI External Professor Sander Bais, is many different things at once. It is a bible for aspiring physicists who want to catapult their scientific maturity and worldview light years ahead — a sort of Feynman Lectures on steroids with beautiful illustrations and an even better sense of humor. It is a compendium for older scientists to reflect on the world and fill in the gaps in their knowledge, and a gorgeous coffee-table book for any aficionado of science who wants to contemplate the wonders of the universe. Most of all, it is fun to read and full of artistic illustrations, pithy remarks, historical perspective, humor, and impish wisdom. It covers much of what is interesting in science, from Moore’s Law, chaos and fractals, complex systems, and the theory of evolution, to Turing machines, epigenetics, quantum computing, and the surprising properties of water.
The first volume, The Journey: From Classical to Quantum Worlds, reviews classical physics and recounts how we got to quantum physics, general relativity, and particle physics. The second, Quantessence: How Quantum Theory Works, dives deeper into the theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics, imparting a feeling for the peculiar and beautiful — yet strange — theory that underlies all of reality. Finally, Hierarchies: The Emergence of Diversity, explains the underpinnings of complex systems, showing how the fundamental laws of nature give rise to everything around us, such as chemistry, life, computers, and nature in general.
But fasten your seatbelt; this is not a tutorial. The book features equations with fun and pithy — but far from comprehensive — explanations. Readers may experience a twinge of vertigo. The trilogy imparts the gestalt of science without all the boring stuff needed to really understand it.
But to quote from the book, “Talking quantum to family and friends at a birthday party often feels like being a tour guide in London to extra-terrestrials who don’t happen to know what a bridge, a museum or a traffic light is.” Nonetheless, the sight-seeing is wondrous.
This remarkable tour de force covers all of physics and much of science in general with elan, insight, and humor, imparting a feeling of awe for the profundity of the laws of the universe. It encapsulates the wisdom that can only be achieved by a brilliant physicist at the end of a long career, and is a tribute to the mystique and magic of science.
Readers can access a free digital version online, but the true artistry of the book, illustrated and typeset by Bais himself, is best enjoyed through the enhanced coffee-table experience of the hardcover.
Before I came here I was confused about this subject.
Enrico Fermi
Having listened to your lecture I am still confused.
But on a higher level.
If the world ‘out there’ is writhing like a barrel of eels, why do we detect a barrel of concrete when we look? To put the question differently, where is the boundary between the random uncertainty of the quantum world, where particles spring into and out of existence, and the orderly certainty of the classical world, where we live, see, and measure? This question…is as deep as any in modern physics.
It drove the years-long debate between Bohr and Einstein. . . . Every physical quantity derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.
— John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam (1998)
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
John von Neumann
In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.
— Werner Heisenberg
. . . But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevent our reaching the same certainty [as in astronomy] about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood.
(Laplace, 1889)
So it is that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.
Surtil : 