Nature Loves to Hide

Malin translates quantum mechanics into plain English, explaining its origins and workings against the backdrop of the famous debate between Niels Bohr and the skeptical Albert Einstein. Then he moves on to build a philosophical framework that can account for the quantum nature of reality. He shows, for instance, how Platonic and Neoplatonic thought resonates with quantum theory. He draws out the linkage between the concepts of Neoplatonism and the more recent process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The universe, Whitehead wrote, is an organic whole, composed not of lifeless objects, but "elementary experiences." Beginning with Whitehead's insight, Malin shows how this concept of "throbs of experience" expresses quantum reality, with its subatomic uncertainties, its constituents that are waves and also particles, its emphasis on acts of measurement.

Once any educated person could explain the universe as a vast Newtonian web of cause and effect, but since quantum theory, reality again appears to be richer and more mysterious than we had thought. Writing with broad humanistic insight and deep knowledge of science, and using delightful conversations with fictional astronauts Peter and Julie to explain more difficult concepts, Shimon Malin offers a profound new understanding of the nature of reality--one that shows a deep continuity with aspects of our Western philosophical tradition going back 2500 years, and that feels more deeply satisfying, and truer, than the clockwork universe of Newton.

Contents

• Acknowledgments.....................................................ix
• Introduction........................................................xi

• 1. Mach's Shadow................................................3
• 2. Einstein's Dilemma..........................................11
• 3. The Call of Complementarity.................................25
• 4. Waves of Nothingness........................................41
• 5. Paul Dirac and the Spin of the Electron.....................51
• 6. An Irresistible Force Meets an Immovable Rock...............59
• 7. "Nature Loves to Hide"......................................69

• 8. The Elusive Obvious.........................................89
• 9. Objectivation..............................................101
• 10. In and Out of Space and Time..............................111
• 11. "Nature Makes a Choice"...................................125
• 12. Nature Alive..............................................135
• 13. Flashes of Existence......................................145
• 14. The Expression of Knowledge...............................153
• 15. A Universe of Experience..................................163
• 16. The Potential and the Actual..............................179

• 17. Levels of Being...........................................191
• 18. Our Place in the Universe.................................209
• 19. Physics and the One.......................................229
• Epilogue.......................................................243
• Appendices.........................................................251
• Notes..............................................................265
• Bibliography.......................................................273
• Index..............................................................277