This book presents quantum theory as a theory based on new relationships among matter, thought, and experimental technology, as against those previously found in physics, relationships that also redefine those between mathematics and physics in quantum theory. The argument of the book is based on its title concept, reality without realism (RWR), and in the corresponding view, the RWR view, of quantum theory. The book considers, from this perspective, the thinking of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac, with the aim of bringing together the philosophy and history of quantum theory. With quantum theory, the book argues, the architecture of thought in theoretical physics was radically changed by the irreducible role of experimental technology in the constitution of physical phenomena, accordingly, no longer defined independently by matter alone, as they were in classical physics or relativity. Or so it appeared. For, quantum theory, the book further argues, made us realize that experimental technology, beginning with that of our bodies, irreducibly shapes all physical phenomena, and thus makes us rethink the relationships among matter, thought, and technology in all of physics.

The interpretation of quantum mechanics in this book is distinguished from other existing interpretations in that it is systematically derived from empirical facts by means of logical considerations as well as methods in the spirit of analytical philosophy, in particular operational semantics. The new interpretation, using a two-model approach overcomes the well-known conceptional problems and paradoxes of ?orthodox? quantum theory. This interdisciplinary book should be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of physics and philosophy of science.

This book explains, in simple but accurate terms, how orthodox quantum mechanics works. The author, a distinguished theoretical physicist, shows how this theory, realistically interpreted, assigns an important role to our conscious free choices. Stapp claims that mainstream biology and neuroscience, despite nearly a century of quantum physics, still stick essentially to failed classical precepts in which mental intentions have no effect upon our bodily actions. He shows how quantum mechanics provides a rational basis for a better understanding of this connection, even allowing an explanation of certain phenomena currently held to be “paranormal”. These ideas have major implications for our understanding of ourselves and our mental processes, and thus also for the meaningfulness of our lives.

In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called ‘quantum enigma.’ This book opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s Cat box of the ‘quantum enigma’ after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework, a relativistic interpretation to advance a liberating quantum sociology. Deeper methodological grounding to further advance the sociological imagination requires investigating whether and how relativistic and quantum scientific revolutions can induce a liberating reinvention of sociology in favor of creative research and a just global society. This, however, necessarily leads us to confront an elephant in the room, the ‘quantum enigma.’ In Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, the first volume of the series commonly titled Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian toward Quantum Imaginations, sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that unriddling the ‘quantum enigma’ depends on whether and how we succeed in dehabituating ourselves in favor of unified relativistic and quantum visions from the historically and ideologically inherited, classical Newtonian modes of imagining reality that have subconsciously persisted in the ways we have gone about posing and interpreting (or not) the enigma itself for more than a century. Once this veil is lifted and the enigma unriddled, he argues, it becomes possible to reinterpret the relativistic and quantum ways of imagining reality (including social reality) in terms of a unified, nonreductive, creative dialectic of part and whole that fosters quantum sociological imaginations, methods, theories, and practices favoring liberating and just social outcomes. The essays in this volume develop a set of relativistic interpretive solutions to the quantum enigma. Following a survey of relevant studies, and an introduction to the transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framing the study, overviews of Newtonianism, relativity and quantum scientific revolutions, the quantum enigma, and its main interpretations to date are offered. They are followed by a study of the notion of the “wave-particle duality of light” and the various experiments associated with the quantum enigma in order to arrive at a relativistic interpretation of the enigma, one that is shown to be capable of critically cohering other offered interpretations. The book concludes with a heuristic presentation of the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of what Tamdgidi calls the creative dialectics of reality. The volume essays involve critical, comparative/integrative reflections on the relevant works of founding and contemporary scientists and scholars in the field. This study is the first in the monograph series “Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation” of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (XIII, 2020), published by OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). OKCIR is dedicated to exploring, in a simultaneously world-historical and self-reflective framework, the human search for a just global society. It aims to develop new conceptual (methodological, theoretical, historical), practical, pedagogical, inspirational and disseminative structures of knowledge whereby the individual can radically understand and determine how world-history and her/his selves constitute one another. Reviews “Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations, Volume 1, Unriddling the Quantum Enigma hits the proverbial nail on the head of an ongoing problem not only in sociology but also much social science—namely, many practitioners’ allegiance, consciously or otherwise, to persisting conceptions of ‘science’ that get in the way of scientific and other forms of theoretical advancement. Newtonianism has achieved the status of an idol and its methodology a fetish, the consequence of which is an ongoing failure to think through important problems of uncertainty, indeterminacy, multivariation, multidisciplinarity, and false dilemmas of individual agency versus structure, among many others. Tamdgidi has done great service to social thought by bringing to the fore this problem of disciplinary decadence and offering, in effect, a call for its teleological suspension—thinking beyond disciplinarity—through drawing upon and communicating with the resources of quantum theory not as a fetish but instead as an opening for other possibilities of social, including human, understanding. The implications are far-reaching as they offer, as the main title attests, liberating sociology from persistent epistemic shackles and thus many disciplines and fields connected to things ‘social.’ This is exciting work. A triumph! The reader is left with enthusiasm for the second volume and theorists of many kinds with proverbial work to be done.” — Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and author of Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge/Paradigm, 2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) "Social sciences are still using metatheoretical models of science based on 19th century newtonian concepts of "time and space". Mohammad H. Tamdgidi has produced a 'tour de force' in social theory leaving behind the old newtonian worldview that still informs the social sciences towards a 21st century non-dualistic, non-reductionist, transcultural, transdisciplinary, post-Einsteinian quantum concept of TimeSpace. Tamdgidi goes beyond previous efforts done by titans of social theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Kyriakos Kontopoulos. This book is a quantum leap in the social sciences at large. Tamdgidi decolonizes the social sciences away from its Eurocentric colonial foundations bringing it closer not only to contemporary natural sciences but also to its convergence with the old Eastern philosophical and mystical worldviews. This book is a masterpiece in social theory for a 21st century decolonial social science. A must read!" — Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, University of California at Berkeley​​​​​​​ "Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology succeeds in adding physical structures to the breadth of the world-changing vision of C. Wright Mills, the man who mentored me at Columbia. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can help us to understand the human universe no less than the physical universe. Just as my Creating Life Before Death challenges bureaucracy’s conformist orientation, so does Liberating Sociology“liberate the infinite possibilities inherent in us.” Given our isolation in the Coronavirus era, we have time to follow Tamdgidi in his journey into the depth of inner space, where few men have gone before. It is there that we can gain emotional strength, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Mandela empowered themselves. That personal development was needed to address not only their own personal problems, but also the mammoth problems of their societies. We must learn to do the same." — Bernard Phillips, Emeritus Sociology Professor, Boston University

Quantum theory attempts to describe the discrete or atomic nature of matter and the physical world. Certain paradoxes connected with the use of our familiar ideas of the theory have led some physicists to suggest that a revision of quantum theory at its most fundamental level is now inevitable, while others think that the wide range of experimental success of the theory make such changes literally unthinkable. This book contains the edited papers presented at a small informal colloquium held in Cambridge in 1968 to discuss the need for fundamental revision in quantum theory. Most schools of thought on the foundations of the theory were represented, and to direct discussion some participants proposed actual changes. A principal aim was to pinpoint the source of difficulty in current ideas of the time or, failing that, to present alongside each other the various viewpoints about them.

One of the aims of this book is to explain in a basic manner the seemingly difficult issues of mathematical structure using some specific examples as a guide. In each of the cases considered, a comprehensible physical problem is approached, to which the corresponding mathematical scheme is applied, its usefulness being duly demonstrated. The authors try to fill the gap that always exists between the physics of quantum field theories and the mathematical methods best suited for its formulation, which are increasingly demanding on the mathematical ability of the physicist. Contents: Survey of Path Integral Quantization and Regularization Techniques; The Zeta-Function Regularization Method; Generalized Spectra and Spectral Functions on Non-Commutative Spaces; Spectral Functions of Laplace Operator on Locally Symmetric Spaces; Spinor Fields; Field Fluctuations and Related Variances; The Multiplicative Anomaly; Applications of the Multiplicative Anomaly; The Casimir Effect. Readership: Mathematical and high energy physicists.

Focusing on experimental results, this updated edition approaches the problem of quantum phase transitions from a new and unifying perspective.

Why does one theory "succeed" while another, possibly clearer interpretation, fails? By exploring two observationally equivalent yet conceptually incompatible views of quantum mechanics, James T. Cushing shows how historical contingency can be crucial to determining a theory's construction and its position among competing views. Since the late 1920s, the theory formulated by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at Copenhagen has been the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet an alternative interpretation, rooted in the work of Louis de Broglie in the early 1920s and reformulated and extended by David Bohm in the 1950s, equally well explains the observational data. Through a detailed historical and sociological study of the physicists who developed different theories of quantum mechanics, the debates within and between opposing camps, and the receptions given to each theory, Cushing shows that despite the preeminence of the Copenhagen view, the Bohm interpretation cannot be ignored. Cushing contends that the Copenhagen interpretation became widely accepted not because it is a better explanation of subatomic phenomena than is Bohm's, but because it happened to appear first. Focusing on the philosophical, social, and cultural forces that shaped one of the most important developments in modern physics, this provocative book examines the role that timing can play in the establishment of theory and explanation.

The editors felt that the time was right for a book on an important topic, the history and development of the notions of chaotic attractors and their "natu ral" invariant measures. We wanted to bring together a coherent collection of readable, interesting, outstanding papers for detailed study and comparison. We hope that this book will allow serious graduate students to hold seminars to study how the research in this field developed. Limitation of space forced us painfully to exclude many excellent, relevant papers, and the resulting choice reflects the interests of the editors. Since James Alan Yorke was born August 3, 1941, we chose to have this book commemorate his sixtieth birthday, honoring his research in this field. The editors are four of his collaborators. We would particularly like to thank Achi Dosanjh (senior editor math ematics), Elizabeth Young (assistant editor mathematics), Joel Ariaratnam (mathematics editorial), and Yong-Soon Hwang (book production editor) from Springer Verlag in New York for their efforts in publishing this book.