Abstract

This book is an introduction to the foundation of quantum mechanics. As such, this book is perfect: it is the book that my former, physics undergraduate, self would have wanted to read. At the time, like typical physics undergraduates around the globe, I was taught to give up hope of ever understanding what quantum theory claims: at best, the theory is an instrument to predict experimental results. No matter how much we might dislike it, we have to accept it; there is no way out. It was my refusal to give in that led me to become a philosopher of physics. And I was right in being persistent because I later discovered that, as Maudlin clearly explains, there is no reason to be pessimistic: all the quantum mysteries and paradoxes have a solution. Actually, more than one. To have Maudlin’s book at the time would have saved me a lot of time and pain. I am sure it will be a life-saver for many other rightfully puzzled undergraduate physics students wondering if the questions they ask are wrongheaded, as too many of their teachers claim: How can the Schrödinger cat really be dead and alive at the same time? Is reality created by an act of observation or a measurement? How is a measurement not a physical process like any other? Because these are not bad questions at all, and they have straightforward answers: the Schrödinger cat cannot be both alive and dead; reality is not created by observation; a measurement is just a type of interaction between two physical systems. However, the book is also not perfect (becoming, ironically, a superposition). While Maudlin defends his own position on how to make sense of quantum theory, his book is also potentially misleading about the state of the art in terms of the philosophical foundations of the theory. Maudlin omits to mention (or cite, or give reference to) the majority of the literature generated in the last two decades around the problems he discusses. Although this book may be intended as an introductory textbook to the field, I am disappointed that it skirts so much of the work of the past few decades on the foundations of quantum theory. To be fair, there is a habit in philosophy of physics at large of failing to sufficiently acknowledge other work, but this is why the failure to do much to rectify this trend in even a short introductory textbook like this one troubles me as much as it does. Indeed, this can mislead students who are new to the material, in the same way that I felt misled by my undergraduate physics instructors about the nature of quantum theory. This is also puzzling because, as I will discuss below, the lack of contextualization of his view within the actual literature makes Maudlin’s arguments weaker than they could have been.