The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology

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Prometheus Books, 1995 - Philosophy - 322 pages
In this fascinating and accessible book, physicist Victor J. Stenger guides the lay reader through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads popularized by such authors as Deepak Chopra and Fritjof Capra. Dr. Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the nonspecialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important findings of contemporary physics. Stenger makes it clear that current scientific hypotheses about the material nature of reality are all we need to explain the available evidence and that mystical notions say more about the human need to believe than about the fundamental makeup of the universe.

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Contents

Preface
7
Acknowledgments
15
Shining Through?
268
Copyright

2 other sections not shown

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About the author (1995)

Victor J. Stenger was born on January 29, 1935. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956, a Master of Science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1963. He worked as an elementary particle physicist for numerous years. He also was a professor at the University of Colorado and the University of Hawaii. He was an advocate against psychics, pseudoscience and religion. During his lifetime, he wrote 13 books including Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe; Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses; God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist; God and the Folly of Faith: The Fundamental Incompatibility of Religion; God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson; and God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Universe. He died of an aneurysm on August 27, 2014 at the age of 79.

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