Adam Becker | |
---|---|
Born | 1984 New Jersey |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | Cornell University, University of Michigan |
Known for | What is Real (2018) |
Awards | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Astrophysics and Philosophy |
Thesis | Is the Universe Normal? Constraining Scale-Dependent Primordial Non-Gaussianity. (2012) |
Doctoral advisor | Dragan Huterer |
Website | freelanceastrophysicist |
Adam Michael Becker (born 1984) is an American astrophysicist, author, and scientific philosopher. His works include the book What Is Real?, published by Basic Books, which explores the history and personalities surrounding the development and evolution of quantum physics, and includes a modern assessment of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
In 2006, Becker received a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in philosophy and physics from Cornell University only to earn a Master of Science degree in physics from the University of Michigan a year later. [1] In 2012, Becker would go on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in physics from the University of Michigan with the physicist Dragan Huterer as his doctoral advisor. His doctoral thesis concerned primordial non-Gaussianity [2] [3] , which he would later summarize in lay terms for his readers, declaring "I was trying to find out how much we can learn about the way stuff was arranged in the early universe by looking at the way stuff is arranged in the universe right now." [3]
After completing his doctoral program, Becker wrote and lectured on scientific concepts, providing lay-friendly professional commentary on science. [3] [4]
Becker has written for several news and periodicals concerning science for the interested layperson, including the BBC [5] (which culminated in a video series), NPR [6] , New Scientist Magazine [7] , Scientific American [8] , the New York Times [9] , Aeon [10] , and the global educational program NOVA on the American PBS. [11]
In 2014, while employed at the Public Library of Science, Becker was a lead developer in a project that produced Rich Citations, which were an extensive expansion to the capabilities of digital cross-referencing across the PLOS platform. [12] . Later, around the publishing of his first book, "What is Real?", Becker was appointed as a visiting scholar at the Office for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley [13] . In 2020 he accepted a position as a visiting researcher in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, at University of California, Irvine [14] . [3]
Becker has also been a member of the California Quantum Interpretation Network, "a research collaboration among faculty and staff at multiple UC campuses and other universities across California, focusing on the interpretation of quantum physics." [13]
Becker has announced ongoing work on a new publication that takes a step away from the controversy of his first book and instead explores the relationship between science and the Consumer Tech Industry that has evolved and been promulgated across the world from the Silicon Valley of California. This new project has an estimated publication date of "late 2023". [3]
In 2016, Becker received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to research and publish a written work concerning the history, development, and controversy surrounding the study and development of the mysticized field of Quantum Foundations. [15] The resulting work, What is Real? (2018), [16] focused on the question of what exactly quantum physics says about the nature of reality.
Despite the fact that every physicist agrees that quantum physics works, a bitter debate has raged over its meaning for the past ninety years, since the theory was first developed. [17]
The book deals with the personalities behind the competing interpretations of quantum physics as well as the historical factors that influenced the debate—factors such as military spending on physics research due to World War II, the Cold War ethos that caused the eschewing of physicists thought to be Marxist, the assumed infallibility of John von Neumann, the sexism that quashed the work of Grete Hermann (the female mathematician who first spotted von Neumann's error), and the sway of prominent philosophical schools of the period, like the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. Niels Bohr appears in the book as the charismatic figure whose stature and obtuse writing style made it hard for alternate interpretations to be voiced. The book also challenges the popular portrayal of Albert Einstein as a behind-the-times thinker who couldn't accept the new paradigm. Becker argues that Einstein's thought experiments aimed at quantum dynamics are not stodgy quibbles with the seeming randomness of quantum physics, as characterized by the popularity of the quote that "God does not play dice". Rather, Einstein's thought experiments are apt critiques of violations of the principle of locality. [18]
"What is Real?" was given mostly positive reviews by lay and expert audiences alike, including the New York Times , Publishers Weekly , the Wall Street Journal, and New Scientist , among others, [19] [4] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] .
In Physics Today , philosopher David Wallace called the book "a superb contribution both to popular understanding of quantum theory and to ongoing debates among experts." [26] And in the journal Nature, Ramin Skibba said "What Is Real? is an argument for keeping an open mind. Becker reminds us that we need humility as we investigate the myriad interpretations and narratives that explain the same data." [27] The journal Science explained, "What Is Real? offers an engaging and accessible overview of the debates surrounding the interpretation of quantum mechanics,". [21]
Physicist Sheldon Glashow wrote a critical review, saying, "I found it distasteful to find a trained astrophysicist invoking a conspiracy by physicists and physics teachers to foist the Copenhagen interpretation upon naive students of quantum mechanics". [28] A review in the journal Science declared the project to be the sporadically accurate presentation of an "oversimplified" summary of either imaginary or merely ostensible conflicts between very complex schools of thought. [21] Reviews in Science News and the American Journal of Physics were also negative, similarly criticizing the book for numerous historical inaccuracies and philosophical oversimplifications. [29] [30]
The book was nominated for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and Physics World Magazine's Book of the Year Award. [31] [32]
Books
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Articles and websites
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.
The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, stemming from the work of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others. The term "Copenhagen interpretation" was apparently coined by Heisenberg during the 1950s to refer to ideas developed in the 1925–1927 period, glossing over his disagreements with Bohr. Consequently, there is no definitive historical statement of what the interpretation entails.
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
The multiverse is the hypothetical set of all universes. Together, these universes are presumed to comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "flat universes", "other universes", "alternate universes", "multiple universes", "plane universes", "parent and child universes", "many universes", or "many worlds". One common assumption is that the multiverse is a "patchwork quilt of separate universes all bound by the same laws of physics."
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation. These views on interpretation differ on such fundamental questions as whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or stochastic, local or non-local, which elements of quantum mechanics can be considered real, and what the nature of measurement is, among other matters.
Satyendra Nath Bose was an Indian mathematician and physicist specializing in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India.
In philosophy, philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in modern physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Philosophy of physics can be broadly divided into three areas:
John Stewart Bell FRS was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden-variable theories.
Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. Smolin's 2006 book The Trouble with Physics criticized string theory as a viable scientific theory. He has made contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory. He also advocates an alternative view on space and time that he calls temporal naturalism. His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.
David Joseph Bohm was an American–Brazilian–British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Among his many contributions to physics is his causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory known as De Broglie–Bohm theory.
Frank Anthony Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full professor at Stockholm University.
Michio Kaku is an American physicist, science communicator, futurologist, and writer of popular-science. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He is also a regular contributor to his own blog, as well as other popular media outlets. For his efforts to bridge science and science fiction, he is a 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Awardee.
James Burkett Hartle was an American theoretical physicist. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966, and was a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Hartle is known for his work in general relativity, astrophysics, and interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mysticism, sometimes referred pejoratively to as quantum quackery or quantum woo, is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered pseudoscience by quantum mechanics experts or quackery.
Jagdish Mehra was an Indian-American physicist and historian of science.
Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein is a biography of Albert Einstein written by Abraham Pais. First published in 1982 by Oxford University Press, the book is one of the most acclaimed biographies of the scientist. This was not the first popular biography of Einstein, but it was the first to focus on his scientific research as opposed to his life as a popular figure. Pais, renowned for his work in theoretical particle physics, was a friend of Einstein's at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early career. Originally published in English in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book has translations in over a dozen languages. Pais later released a sequel to the book in 1994 titled Einstein Lived Here and, after his death in 2000, the University Press released a posthumous reprint of the biography in 2005, with a new foreword by Roger Penrose. Considered very popular for a science book, the biography sold tens of thousands of copies of both paperback and hardcover versions in its first year. The book has received many reviews and, the year after its initial publication, it won both the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction, in Science (Hardcover), and the 1983 Science Writing Award.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)