In 1953, reflecting on early ventures in quantum theory, J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke of terror and exaltation, of history happening in a realm so remote from common experience that it was “unlikely to be known to any poet or historian.” Yet now, anyone can Google “quantum theory” and find more than 34 million entries—from poets and historians, certainly, as well as film critics and Buddhist monks. How—and how pervasively—quantum mechanics has entered the general culture is the subject of this book, an engaging, eclectic, and thought-provoking look at the curious, boundlessly fertile intersection of scientific thought and everyday life.

Including recollections of encounters with the theory and the people responsible for it, Jeremy Bernstein’s account ranges from the cross-pollination of quantum mechanics with Marxist ideology and Christian and Buddhist mysticism to its influence on theater, film, and fiction. Along the way, Bernstein focuses on those—such as Niels Bohr, the Dalai Lama, W. H. Auden, and Tom Stoppard—who have made quantum physics; who have argued over it, pondered it, or taken literary inspiration from it, and who have misunderstood, misconstrued, or misapplied it. One person in particular supplies a narrative thread: John Bell, a notable yet underappreciated physicist who did groundbreaking research in quantum physics. In Bell’s story, Bernstein provides a uniquely readable account of what physicists call the “measurement problem.”

Quantum Leaps is a lively, erudite book on a subject that Bernstein has lived with for most of its history. His experience and deep understanding are apparent on every page.

Together with relativity theory, quantum mechanics stands as the conceptual foundation of modern physics. It forms the basis by which we understand the minute workings of the subatomic world. But at its core lies a paradox: standard conceptions of quantum mechanics imply that many of the actual measurements whose results we take to support and verify quantum mechanical theory can have no definite outcomes. Some quantity such as position or momentum is always indefinite on a quantum system; and if an indefinite quantity is measured, the macroscopic state of the measuring apparatus that is supposed to record the outcome instead becomes indefinite itself. In Quantum Measurement, editors Richard A. Healey and Geoffrey Hellman marshal the resources of leading physicists and philosophers of science, skillfully joining their insights and ingenuity to yield some of the most innovative and altogether promising thought to date on this enigmatic issue. Throughout this authoritative volume, these authors explore the subtle and varied ways in which quantum mechanics informs the conditions, indeed the very process, of quantum measurement. The latest work on decoherence phenomena is combined with sophisticated modal interpretations, suggesting that definite values might be systematically attributed to a limited class of quantum observables while gauging the correspondent impact of environmental interactions on quantum interference terms. What emerges from this careful synthesis is a theoretically powerful and energetic new approach to the measurement dilemma, one that furthers our conceptual understanding of the fundamental interconnections between micro- and macroscopic systems, and that strives, ultimately, to describe and define within a unified quantum mechanical framework the breadth of our physical reality. Contributors: Guido Bacciagaluppi, Jeffrey Bub, Rob Clifton, Michael Dickson, Dennis Dieks, Andrew Elby, Anthony J. Leggett, Bradley Monton, Abner Shimony, William Unruh, Pieter Vermaas. Richard A. Healey is professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. Geoffrey Hellman is professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. ISBN 0-8166-3065-8 Cloth/jacket $39.95

This text, the Questions concerning Aristotle's On Animals [Quaestiones super de animalibus], recovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century and never before translated in its entirety, represents Conrad of Austria's report on a series of disputed questions that Albert the Great addressed in Cologne ca. 1258.