Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Quantum physics is the golden child of modern science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from elementary particles and basic forces to the behavior of materials. But for a century it has also been the problem child of science: it has been plagued by intense disagreements between its inventors, strange paradoxes, and implications that seem like the stuff of fantasy. Whether it's Schrödinger's cat--a creature that is simultaneously dead and alive--or a belief that the world does not exist independently of our observations of it, quantum theory challenges our fundamental assumptions about reality. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin provocatively argues that the problems which have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more to quantum physics, waiting to be discovered. Our task--if we are to have simple answers to our simple questions about the universe we live in--must be to go beyond quantum mechanics to a description of the world on an atomic scale that makes sense. In this vibrant and accessible book, Smolin takes us on a journey through the basics of quantum physics, introducing the stories of the experiments and figures that have transformed our understanding of the universe, before wrestling with the puzzles and conundrums that the quantum world presents.
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What Hacker News says
- Another book I'm enjoying is "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" [1] by Lee Smolin, which also has a deep dive into foundations of QM.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Unfinished-Revolution-Searc...
- Has anyone else read Lee Smolin's new book, "Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum"?
It provides an excellent overview of how quantum physics got hijacked by Bohr, how Einstein's realist views were stymied by his inability to let go of locality (and how this is understandable because he depended on locality to develop relativity theory, and the fact that he died before experiment demonstrated quantum non-locality), an overview of realist interpretations (and their drawbacks!), and a direction for future research.
- If you're a lay person like me and you want to make sense of this, read "Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum" by Lee Smolin. It was just published recently, and it anticipates this result!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316818/einsteins-un...
- I wrote a comment one level above where I recommended "Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum" by Lee Smolin, and I thought I'd toss that in the ring here.
- Lee Smolins book "einstein's unfinished revolution" is a fairly accessible, and all of his papers are on arxiv, e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05108.pdf
Stephen Wolfram has an interesting blog post which is somewhat related https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-re...
't Hoofts book about celular automata interpretation is free at https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319412849
There are several theories predicting collapse of wavefunction which would prevent quantum computers e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation
- Einstein died before we learned that quantum entanglement was not local and occurs over distance. The book "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution"[0] talks about what he knew and what was found after his death. It also talks about where and why modern quantum mechanics diverge from his theories.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Unfinished_Revolu...
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