Lavinia reviewed Einstein's Unfinished Revolution by Lee Smolin
Review of "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Lee Smolin, like Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others, is a scientific realist. A realist is someone who believe that nature is out there, it is real and has whenever properties it has independent of how we observe it or conceive it. He believes that the purpose of science is to describe this world. But, many of the greatest scientists of 20th century, like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg where philosophically anti-realists. They argued that science is not about how nature is, but the interactions we have with nature. They basically speak of two worlds. One is the world we observe, the classical world, and the other is the quantum world. The two worlds not only satisfy different rules but, furthermore the properties we attach to atoms don’t exist until we create them, until we interact with them.
In his book Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond …
Lee Smolin, like Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others, is a scientific realist. A realist is someone who believe that nature is out there, it is real and has whenever properties it has independent of how we observe it or conceive it. He believes that the purpose of science is to describe this world. But, many of the greatest scientists of 20th century, like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg where philosophically anti-realists. They argued that science is not about how nature is, but the interactions we have with nature. They basically speak of two worlds. One is the world we observe, the classical world, and the other is the quantum world. The two worlds not only satisfy different rules but, furthermore the properties we attach to atoms don’t exist until we create them, until we interact with them.
In his book Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond the quantum, Lee Smolin argues that the disagreements between realists and anti-realists that “have bedevilled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong.” Physicists, he says, have failed to solve fundamental problems in science, like what caused the Big Bang, or the unification of science, because they have the wrong basis.
There are a number of proposals for an alternative theory, and Lee Smolin discusses a few of them, like David Bohm’s Pilot Wave Theory, also known as Bohmian mechanics, and Hugh Everett’s Many World’s Interpretation, but he concludes that these proposals are not satisfactory.
Physics needs some really fundamental re-thinking, he says. If we want to unify our picture of the quantum realm which covers the very small with the theory of gravity that covers the very large, then Physics needs some really fundamental re-thinking, he says and suggests that the physicists that work in the foundations of physics, need to start thinking for an alternative to quantum mechanisms, a realist theory that describes exactly what is happening in every experiment and it’s not just an algorithm that describes probabilities.
