The great thing about Carroll’s book though is that (at least if you buy the hardback) you can tear off the dust jacket, throw it away, and unlike earlier such books, you’ll be left with something well-written, and if not “entirely reasonable”, at least mostly reasonable.Ĭarroll gives an unusually lucid explanation of what the standard quantum formalism says, making clear the ways in which it gives a coherent picture of the world, but one quite a bit different than that of classical mechanics. This kind of ridiculous multi-worlds woo is by now rather tired, you can find variants of it in a host of other popular books written over the past 25 years. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. Academics discourage students from working on the “dead end” of quantum foundations. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand.

Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps-which have come to be simply ignored.

Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. Most people won’t read much beyond the front flap, where they’ll be told: Sean Carroll’s new (available in stores early September) book, Something Deeply Hidden, is a quite good introduction to issues in the understanding of quantum mechanics, unfortunately wrapped in a book cover and promotional campaign of utter nonsense.

Something deeply hidden book