Author Tim Maudlin, who is regarded as one of the world’s foremost physicists and philosophers of science, provides a comprehensive and unusual introduction to the philosophy of quantum mechanics in this book. The book will be important to all students of philosophy and physics since it is the most succinct, clearest, and perfect description of his influential approach to the subject.
Quantum mechanics has a special place in the history of physics because of its revolutionary nature. Incredibly, even though it has given the most precise predictions of any scientific theory, there has never been a consensus on what the theory indicates about physical reality, which is remarkable. Maudlin contends that the phrase “quantum theory” is a misnomer in and of itself. Even though a genuine physical theory should explicitly describe what is there and what it does, most textbooks treat quantum mechanics as if it were a predictive recipe in quest of an underlying physical theory.
Maudlin, on the other hand, investigates three proper theories that are capable of recovering the quantum predictions:
- The indeterministic wavefunction collapse theory of Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber
- The deterministic particle theory of deBroglie and Bohm
- The conceptually challenging Many Worlds theory of Everett
In addition, Maudlin investigates the deterministic particle theory of deBroglie and Bohm. Each proposes the essence of physical reality fundamentally differently, but Maudlin demonstrates that none of them are what they are commonly believed to be.
