Présentation de l'éditeur
A discussion of the implications for philosophy of recent experimental results that confirm some counterintuitive aspects of the way matter behaves. The authors show that a generalised principle of complementarity is pervasive not only in physical theories such as cosmological models of the universe, but also in the construction of all human realities. They discuss in detail Bells inequalities for quantum mechanical measurements as well as recent experiments which imply that even remote parts of the universe are "entangled." They go on to suggest that consciousness can no longer be divorced from the way science operates, and conclude by claiming that this entails a new way of understanding the universe - one that could obviate much of the current conflict between science and religion while providing at the same time a basis for valuation that is better suited for co-ordinating all human experience. This second edition has been completely rewritten and brought up to date.
Book Description
This book explores the implications for physics and philosophy of a strange new fact of nature: that particles can be "entangled" over enormous distances, and that measurements made on such entangled particles in one place can have an instantaneous effect in another. Such interactions seem to (but actually do not, as the authors show) violate the principle that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, which is why Einstein called them "spooky interactions at a distance."
The authors provide the necessary background to understand these "nonlocal" interactions, and explain the experiments that confirmed their existence. They discuss how the nonlocal effects depend on the fundamental complementarity of natural phenomena, such as the wave-particle duality. They go on to show that the results have profound implications for our understanding of the foundations of physics and for our view of the universe. In particular, they argue that consciousness can no longer be divorced from our understanding of the way nature works, and they illustrate this new epistemological approach with an attempt to resolve some ambiguities in our view of the origin and evolution of the universe.
