Scargill

I’m less prone to reading books than I am watching videos but in this case, I think Sean Carroll’s book “Something Deeply Hidden” could be worth sacrificing some of my holiday time for – ok, so it is freezing cold anyway.

Sean makes relatively light work of getting your head into Quantum Mechanics, but more importantly Sean is very honest and open about the fact that although we use this very effectively to get real world results in a variety of disciplines, we don’t actually entirely understand the how and why. But then we made GREAT use of Aspirin long before we knew how it worked.

For anyone who thinks that all physicists are entirely in a world of their own, beyond anything the rest of us can take in – this book is starting to look like an eye opener – I’m only part way through, my sister kindly got this (new-ish) book from her (obviously upmarket) local library for me and I have just over a week to get through it.

Clearly we are not yet at the point where we anywhere near fully understand the universe from the smallest particles upwards, but books like this have to be better than the completely implausible “god made it all happen” alternative.

I am 65 and I remember not that long ago when the many-worlds (parallel universes) interpretation of reality was nothing more than pub-talk (and sci-fi movie fodder) along with black holes – the latter of course has just recently seen the first actual photo remove all doubt as to whether or not black holes exist – it will take a LOT longer to get a general consensus on (followed up, hopefully by a clear undertanding of) the former even though we are on the cusp of revolutionishing actual, real computers and even AI because of it, but maybe with more writers like Sean Carroll we may some day get to the point where we no longer feel the need to fall back on imposing fairy tales on our children for comfort (though some western countries have made a start despite not yet having entirely satisfactory alternatives).

Seriously, I am NOT into maths so for me to get past the first chapter of a book like this counts as a recommendation. If for example you get annoyed by oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statements like “objects are in a superimposition of all possible states until observed” you could do worse than pick up this book. Don’t expect magical solutions to all our collective comprehension problems however.

The full title of this book for reference is “Something Deeply Hidden – Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime” by Sean Carroll.

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