WHAT IS REAL?: THE UNFINISHED QUEST FOR THE MEANING OF QUANTUM PHYSICS
Book ID/图书代码： 13000515B83923
English Summary/英文概要： Cats that are both dead and alive, atoms that ‘know’ when you are looking at them and particles that seem to travel down two different paths at once. Despite these strange features, quantum theory is the most successful framework for understanding the universe that we have, explaining why the sun shines and how to build a computer out of silicon. But there’s a problem: no one actually knows how to interpret the bizarre picture of nature that it reveals.
According to Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, there is no need to worry about how the quantum world can be so strange, because “there is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description.” Bohr inspired a flawed and pernicious orthodoxy that has somehow held sway over science for almost a century: the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, a nonsensical pile of vague assertions and mutually contradictory statements about the nature of reality. The Copenhagen interpretation has been bruised, battered, and thoroughly refuted, time and again — yet it’s still the most widely-accepted account of how the quantum world works, largely because Bohr “brainwashed a whole generation of physicists,” as Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, put it.
In THE REALITY WARS, Adam Becker exposes this lie at the heart of quantum physics. How did the Copenhagen interpretation gain wide acceptance in the face of opposition from Einstein, Schrödinger, and others? How did it remain so totally dominant for most of the 20th century? How did it ruin the reputations and careers of those physicists who challenged it? Why have physicists finally started to renounce it? And what does Copenhagen’s rise and fall tell us about how science works?
This is a rich and sordid history, filled with not only mind-bending physics, but also geopolitical intrigue and personal drama. It’s a story of the 20th century in microcosm, an intellectual adventure that will engage readers even if they’ve never heard of Schrödinger’s cat. Ultimately this is a story about the human aspects of science, and the relationship between science, philosophy and culture – about how we choose between different ideas of what the universe is like and how we decide what mysteries we believe we are capable of understanding.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 猫咪生下来或是生或是死；粒子似乎在同一时间沿着两种轨迹运动……除了这些奇怪的特征，量子力学是我们了解宇宙、解释太阳为何发光、如何利用硅元素制造电脑的最成功的理论框架。然而，我们面临着一个问题：没有人能够真正解释量子力学所揭露的奇异属性。
根据量子力学之父Niels Bohr所说，毋庸担心量子世界的奇异，因为“没有所谓的量子世界，有的只是抽象的量子机械描述”。 Bohr开辟了所谓的“哥本哈根诠释”，该理论盛行了近一个世纪。尽管一直以来不停有人对“哥本哈根诠释”进行反驳，但它仍旧是关于量子世界的最为广泛接受的阐释。
在《现实战争》一书中，作者 Adam Becker从量子力学的核心问题出发，揭露了这一谬论。“哥本哈根诠释”为何能在各方反对中仍旧被广泛接受？为何能在20世纪占据如此重要的学术地位？它又是如何摧毁了那些挑战权威的物理学家的声望和事业的？“哥本哈根诠释”的兴衰能向我们揭露哪些科学运作原理？
这是一段复杂而又私欲熏心的历史，不仅充斥着物理学，还饱含了地理政治学阴谋。这是一部20世纪的微观小说。最终，这也是一个有关人类科学的故事，讲述了科学、哲学和文化之间的关系，以及我们是如何选择不同的想法、如何决定我们能够理解的未解之谜。(LYR)
Awards/获奖情况：约9万词的完整手稿预计将于2017年年初完成，书籍将于2017年秋季在美国发行。
The complete manuscript of approximately 90,000 words is due for delivery in early 2017, and Basic Books will publish in the US in autumn 2017.
I thought Grand China might like to see this great animation that the BBC has produced, based on an interview that Adam Becker gave about WHAT IS REAL?
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09fgqll/how-can-we-truly-understand-what-s-real-
About the Author/作者介绍： Adam Becker是一名自由职业者，从事天体物理学研究以及科学类写作。他1984年出生于美国新泽西州，曾于康乃尔大学攻读哲学和物理学，并于2012年获得密歇根大学天体物理学博士学位。他通过许多媒体平台发表其对科学的热衷，包括BBC和 《新科学家》杂志。自从在大学期间学习量子力学起，他就开始研究并思考关于这本书的构想，期间受到过正统观点的干扰。
Adam Becker is a freelance astrophysicist and science writer. Born in New Jersey in 1984, he studied philosophy and physics at Cornell University and earned a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2012. He channels his passion for communicating science across many forms of media,
including the BBC and New Scientist, and has been researching and thinking about this book ever since learning quantum physics at college over a decade ago and being bothered by the orthodox view.
Format:
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：SOLD
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：版权已售：Basic Books for world English language rights
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