Synchronicity : the epic quest to understand the quantum nature of cause and effect / Paul Halpern, PHD.
Material type:![Text](/opac-tmpl/lib/famfamfam/BK.png)
- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781541673632
- 1541673638
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() |
Main Library | NonFiction | 539.725 H195 | Available | 33111010388482 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
One of Physics Worlds Best of Physics in 2020
From Aristotle's Physics to quantum teleportation, learn about the scientific pursuit of instantaneous connections in this insightful examination of our world. For millennia, scientists have puzzled over a simple question: Does the universe have a speed limit? If not, some effects could happen at the same instant as the actions that caused them -- and some effects, ludicrously, might even happen before their causes. By one hundred years ago, it seemed clear that the speed of light was the fastest possible speed. Causality was safe. And then quantum mechanics happened, introducing spooky connections that seemed to circumvent the law of cause and effect. Inspired by the new physics, psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli explored a concept called synchronicity, a weird phenomenon they thought could link events without causes. Synchronicity tells that sprawling tale of insight and creativity, and asks where these ideas -- some plain crazy, and others crazy powerful -- are taking the human story next.
"In Synchronicity Paul Halpern tells the little-known story of the unlikely friendship between the Nobel-prize-winning quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the father of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung. In the 1930s, Pauli and Jung began collaborating on a unified theory of quantum and the mind, the result of which was Jung's synchronicity principle-the idea that events connected by meaning need not be explained by causality. Pauli's work on entanglement theory, which allowed for instantaneous cause and effect relationships, was particularly appealing to Jung, as it seemed to give weight to his controversial theory of a collective unconscious. Casting their relationship within a larger intellectual history of entanglement theory, Halpern poses a question that has mystified physicists and philosophers alike since the times of Aristotle: Is the speed of light finite, as Einstein posited, or is it, as Pauli and the proponents of entanglement theory asserted, variable across time and dimensions? As Halpern works his way through the history of the physics of cause and effect, he shows that this centuries-old debate is not only relevant at the smallest scales of particle physics but also at the largest scales of the cosmos itself"-- Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-276) and index.