Cao Tianyuan (Capo): “Does God Play Dice? — A History of Quantum Physics”

Cao Tianyuan (Capo): “Does God Play Dice?—A History of Quantum Physics,” Liaoning Education Publishing House, January 2006

Taking a hard-seat train home is really quite nice. I slept for six hours, read for six hours, and the whole night passed in a rather fulfilling way. That night I happened to finish this idle read.

I have always not read popular science books on the cutting edge when they’re written by Chinese authors, but this one was an exception. What attracted me was the advertising copy on the cover: “A popular science book of super influence, hailed as ‘China’s A Brief History of Time’; strongly recommended by Dong Guangbi, Jiang Xiaoyuan, Liu Bing, Wu Yishan, Liu Huajie” — as for the first half of that sentence, “China’s A Brief History of Time,” I can only smile it off, but that string of recommenders was extremely lethal to me, so I bought it.

After reading the whole book through, I feel that this book really does count as a masterpiece of domestic popular science on quantum theory, and it is quite engaging. Of course, this book is really not fit for polite society, because it was originally serialized on internet forums, and the lines are full of internet-style colloquialisms — things like “going crazy,” “I,” “big brother”… But this can also count as one of the book’s distinctive features: not rigorous enough, but more than sufficiently accessible. Still, the book’s sorting-out of the development of quantum physics is indeed quite interesting, and the relevant knowledge it covers is also very complete and very up to date. This book can give readers some “feel” for quantum physics, which is rather valuable. Of course, it still cannot be mentioned in the same breath as those classics like A Brief History of Time that are profound yet accessible, elegant yet popular.

By the way, the editorial standard of this book is truly abysmally poor! The “errata sheet” tucked into the book lists eight obvious errors, but from my reading the obvious mistakes are far more than eight; errors that can be spotted at a glance, such as writing 10¹⁷ as 1017, appear many times. In addition, seemingly for the sake of aesthetics, every page has, in the upper right corner, a solar-system-style design of an electron orbiting an atom. Leaving aside whether it makes the book more beautiful or uglier, just looking at the editor’s use of this solar-system model as an atomic image, one knows that he clearly has almost no understanding of quantum physics. I don’t know why the editor would choose a typical classical mechanics motif to decorate a book about quantum mechanics, and decorate it so uglyly at that…

Thinking that I have always had some thoughts on the philosophical significance of quantum physics, of course my thoughts are nowhere near as profound as those of physicists, but I have at least arrived at some understanding of various questions on my own — although quantum mechanics is an absolute monster and utterly impossible to understand, I merely have some ideas about the philosophical meanings that can be drawn from it. Below, I’ll set down a little outline so I won’t forget later: wave-particle duality — double-slit interference… the breaking apart of reality; the uncertainty principle — uncertainty principle… agnosticism; Schrödinger’s cat — Wigner’s friend… subjective idealism… solipsism?; EPR… holism?; MWI — the ultimate anthropic principle… the rebirth of objectivity and determinacy, &… immortality?; GUT — superstrings… simplicity, symmetry.

January 16, 2006

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Kuangren Ahlu  

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.