After Physics by David Z. Albert (PDF)

Description

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Albert here takes on a combative style and one can sense his hammering at many of his contemporaries in the field. I like the style and it makes for a rather brisk reading. The main argument seems to be that at its fundamental level, reality is not a 3 dimensional space (plus time) in which move the various objects (including particles and chairs) of our every day experience coupled with some sort of shadowy existence called the “quantum mechanical wave function”. Nor is reality in some sense equal part wave function in 3N dimensional (where N is the number of particles in the universe) space mapped into 3D space. Albert shows that there is no way to coherently map those two spaces together. Instead, Albert argues that what is really fundamental (ontologically) is the 3N space of the quantum wave, and that the “familiar” 3D space is entirely derivative. We live in the shadow, the qm space is the real one, and the reason the shadow looks so real to us is that everything from the particles to consciousness (presumably) is derived (that is the shadow from the reality) in the same way. Albert explores this idea using both Bohmian Mechanics and two variations on the GRW wave collapse theory. He does this to show that they come out equivalently, that is that each of these views can manifest in the same illusory 3D space of our familiar experience. In his last chapter, Albert addresses the Everett many-worlds hypothesis (he calls it the “fission theory”) but does so in order to dismiss it as misleading. One gets the impression that he takes this up only because it has become so popular among contemporary physicists. Among other points, Albert shows that when the qm space is viewed as fundamental, there are no ambiguities, uncertainties, or quantum mysteries. Everything is straight forwardly deterministic in the ordinary statistical sense associated with thermodynamics. The “mysteries of quantum mechanics” only appear to be mysteries if you take our ordinary 3D space to be ontologically fundamental.Albert does not particulary address the mater of time, but time’s reality seems implicit, even in the “real ontology” of the qm wave because the wave does, after all, evolve deterministically THROUGH TIME, although he could still argue that the time of our every day experience is illusory. I also do not quite see how his idea accommodates consciousness. It is one thing to say that a particle, chair, or planet amounts to a “clumping of the wave function” but how this would manifest as the color blue, or for that matter a free-willed choice is not at all clear to me.To be fair, neither time, nor consciousness was a part of Albert’s focus, and I take no issue with his attempt to clear up qm mystery by standing reality on its head. It is an approach worth considering, even if in the end it does not account for everything.

⭐But I find I need to concentrate very hard to understand the long explanations. I have less trouble understanding long mathematical derivations, so I find myself wanting to diagram the arguments!!

⭐It was the second word in the title that drew my attention to this book, but I should have paid more attention to the first. This little book is packed with tortured, convoluted reasoning and such statements as “a fact which an approximately formulated Boltzmannian Bohmian mechanics of the world must presumably endorse” that make it practically impossible to even read, much less comprehend. The author is a professor of philosophy at Columbia, so this presumably is philosophy, but I think it would make Socrates shudder.

⭐The title of this book, ‘After Physics’, is a play on the original, literal meaning of `metaphysics.’ It consists of connected essays contributing to debates over the metaphysics of modern physics, including the direction of time but most prominently the notorious quantum measurement problem. This book is not a popularization and is not meant for those unfamiliar with the past hypothesis, Bohmian mechanics, GRW theory, the Everett interpretation and arguments over wavefunction realism. Reading the author’s earlier books — “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” and “Time and Chance” — is probably the quickest way to pick up most of the necessary background. I give this book five stars because it offers penetrating insights into many of the disputes it addresses, regardless of the author’s sometimes idiosyncratic writing style.Focusing on his essays on the measurement problem, Albert examines proposed realistic solutions and argues effectively that there is no need, and in fact that it makes no sense for there to be a `primitive ontology’ of things in three-dimensional space, separate from the wavefunction in high-dimensional configuration space, to anchor the manifest appearance of our three-dimensional world. Such a primitive ontology appears in the usual presentation of the Bohmian solution to the measurement problem as particles in space, and as a matter-density field or a so-called flash field in the GRW solution. Albert argues that both of these solutions should be couched in terms of pure wavefunction realism, where in the Bohmian case there would be a single, special point in configuration space that encodes the positions of all the particles. His wavefunction monism would seem to lead toward the Everett interpretation, but Albert argues that Everett founders on the question of probabilities. In this vein he offers penetrating arguments against the decision-theoretic approach developed by Wallace and others. By Book’s end it is clear that Albert favors a version of GRW with a pure wavefunction ontology. For what it’s worth, I remain an Everettian after reading this book, and would argue that the illusion of probability remains supported by unitary wave mechanics notwithstanding all of the author’s good points.

⭐I found this book nearly impenetrable. It reads as the musings of a logicician. Each paragraph repeats most of the previous paragraph with a few “if”s, “and”s, “consequently”s and “therefore”s added. I thought it a great idea for a book but it is written for the graduate philosopher, not the amateur quantum mechanics student.

⭐Impenetrable. Could be of interested to those with a royal family fetish.

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