Book Review: Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Science

Omnes' thesis is that modern science has become formal, no longer based upon an intuitive understanding. One of the struggles in physics is, as Bohr has said, "compute". That is, you can't reason out what the result must be, you have to compute the result without a mental model. Ideas such as locality and causality have been shown false in the quantum domain so any reasoning that includes them is also false. Likewise, mathematics has unhinged from its intuitive background (e.g. Hilberts notion of replacing point, line, and plane with table, chair, glass). He describes a "fracture" within science that is new, novel, and a challenge to understand. Our primitive notions are no longer a good basis for modern science. [0] Omnes, Roland "Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science" Princeton University Press, 1999 0-691-02787-0