Of course the authors could never put in enough caveats to satisfy most physicists on this matter, but I think their honesty and effort helps the book considerably. Indeed the authors have little sympathy for movies such as “What the Bleep do we Know?” and the related mysticism of the Deepak Chopra crowd, which is good, in my humble opinion. Now on to the subject of the book: “consciousness” and quantum theory (sorry I’m going to keep those little quotes around that word because I have no idea what it means.) The book does a fairly good job of pointing out that whenever they bring up “conscinousness” they are venturing into a territory in which most physicists would get up and leave. Some people vote with their feet, apparently I think with my foot?) On the other hand it did tickle a lot of my “why I don’t like consciousness interpretations” nerve (that one is located on my foot, I think. I’m a nitpicker when it comes to popular science, and I will say that the book did tickle some of my nitpicking nerves, but a lot less than the average popular science quantum theory book.

One young woman objected: “I’ved dated guys who couldn’t pass a Turing test!” In class one day, I (Bruce) casually commented that any human could easily pass a Turing test.

Even in these chapters the humor remains: The final chapters of the book are devoted to the question of whether consciousness plays a role in quantum theory. It covers what you might expect from such a book, the two slit experiment, Schrodinger’s cat, EPR, and Bell’s theorem, many with an good dose of humor which makes the book fun to read. “Quantum Enigma” is basically a popular science book explaining in a nice way the “mysteries” of quantum theory with a slant towards the idea that maybe “consciousness” has something to do with these mysteries.

But I’m not one who likes to leave holes in what I’ve experienced, so I was delighted when I was asked to read and review Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner (both from UC Santa Cruz.) And that is any interpretation which brings human consciousness into the picture. (A statement, I think, which is at times to cavalier for my opinion about the foundations of quantum theory, but is, at other times, not cavalier enough!) And at times I’d even say that multiple interpretations worked for me (joke about one for each universe deleted.) But there has always been one form of interpretation which I’ve avoided. I’ve been reading about these different interpretations for as long as I can remember and, at various times in my life, I’ve thought one or another of the interpretations worked for me. There are many different interpretations of quantum theory.

Bruce rosenblum physics