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Time Loops and Space Twists: How God Created the Universe
In his most important book since Taking the Quantum Leap, Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D., explains how our understanding of time, space, and matter have changed in just the last few years, and how with these new ideas we have a glimpse into the "mind of God." Making comparisons to Hindu Vedic and Judeo-Christian cosmology, Dr. Wolf explains how the universal command of the Deity "Let there be light" now takes on a new scientific Everything is literally made of light and the reader will learn how quantum physics proves this is so. Contains 70 b&w illustrations.
- GenresScience
324 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 6, 2017
Abandoned half way through.
I just could not cope any longer with the New Age pseudo-scientific BS, the unjustified (or at least experimentally unproven) claims, the loose terminology, the lack of conceptual lucidity, the logical jumps, the populist and sensationalist approach to physics, the over-simplifications, the confusion between what is speculation as opposed what has been proven experimentally. I could not stomach any more of this. I want my time back. Pity, as the first chapter (about special relativity) was not too bad at all and I quite enjoyed reading it.
Why on Earth did I waste my time on a book where it is claimed that retro-causality exists, that the tachyons exist and that they appear to be a good way of dealing with the phenomenon of spatial nonlocality in quantum physics, or that the the "Mind of God" is a sort of tachyonic mind field; not so surprising statements, maybe, as the author has an history of making quite fantastic (or at least far from mainstream science) claims when it comes to the nature of consciousness. I should have known better.
Sorry, but I have no time for this. Life is too short and this book is not for me. Pity, as the author has a respectable background in the field, and he even got a National Book Award in Science around 30 years ago. If you are interested in real science, there is much, much better stuff out there.
On the other hand, if you are into the "quantum woo" fad (if, for example, you love books like "The Tao of Physics" or "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"), then you will most definitely enjoy reading it - I did not.
I just could not cope any longer with the New Age pseudo-scientific BS, the unjustified (or at least experimentally unproven) claims, the loose terminology, the lack of conceptual lucidity, the logical jumps, the populist and sensationalist approach to physics, the over-simplifications, the confusion between what is speculation as opposed what has been proven experimentally. I could not stomach any more of this. I want my time back. Pity, as the first chapter (about special relativity) was not too bad at all and I quite enjoyed reading it.
Why on Earth did I waste my time on a book where it is claimed that retro-causality exists, that the tachyons exist and that they appear to be a good way of dealing with the phenomenon of spatial nonlocality in quantum physics, or that the the "Mind of God" is a sort of tachyonic mind field; not so surprising statements, maybe, as the author has an history of making quite fantastic (or at least far from mainstream science) claims when it comes to the nature of consciousness. I should have known better.
Sorry, but I have no time for this. Life is too short and this book is not for me. Pity, as the author has a respectable background in the field, and he even got a National Book Award in Science around 30 years ago. If you are interested in real science, there is much, much better stuff out there.
On the other hand, if you are into the "quantum woo" fad (if, for example, you love books like "The Tao of Physics" or "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"), then you will most definitely enjoy reading it - I did not.
June 25, 2018
Interesting bit of quantum physics.
July 20, 2016
I found this book very difficult to read. The author's intent is to teach quantum field theory without advanced mathematics. While I did learn some things, I don't feel I understand most of it. If I worked harder and reread it, I might have understood more, but I just didn't think it was worth the effort.
Some of the more worthwhile things I found:
“At lightspeed there is no time and no space... For light there is no time or space.” From the perspective of the photon, it has traveled 0 distance in 0 time.
“One of the things we've discovered is that when you're trying to represent the way an object such as a particle moves, you have to represent it in terms of waves. This is one of the first paradoxes that quantum physics puts into the mix: even though a particle seems to have a definite position and a definite location in space and time, when it's not being observed, it acts very strangely, like a field of waves spread out over all space and time out to infinity in all directions.”
“When you combine quantum physics and relativity, you realize that not everything has to travel slower than light: some particles can actually travel faster than light, and this appears as if they are traveling backward in time.”
“Since tachyons can always be seen as moving at infinite speed, they appear to be a good way of dealing with the phenomenon of spatial nonlocality in quantum physics. That is, between two remote events describing the movement of so-called back-to-back particles in a coherent entanglement, if measurement of one of the particles occurs, the other instantly appears to have been measured, resulting in a correlation between the two measurement events... Because such particles with imaginary masses are confined to speeds in excess of light, they may be seen to play a role in memory processes and a role in feeling intent following the orderly process of thinking... Mind may not arise from the brain, but actually exists in the whole universe – the Mind of God, so to speak, as a tachyonic mind field. Our brains are something like radio receivers that through our actions of intent simply tune in to this greater mind to produce our mundane and, at times, perhaps profound thoughts, feelings, and intuitions and even our five perceptive senses... The key point here is that in quantum physics, we know that observation changes whatever is being observed. Observation is a mind-like event – no mind, no observation. We also know that observation instantly collapses the wave of possibility from a spectrum of many possibilities to an emergence of just one of them. If we are to associate a field with this collapse, it must be a tachyonic field, since this sudden event must occur in a spacelike manner – faster-than-light.”
Some of the more worthwhile things I found:
“At lightspeed there is no time and no space... For light there is no time or space.” From the perspective of the photon, it has traveled 0 distance in 0 time.
“One of the things we've discovered is that when you're trying to represent the way an object such as a particle moves, you have to represent it in terms of waves. This is one of the first paradoxes that quantum physics puts into the mix: even though a particle seems to have a definite position and a definite location in space and time, when it's not being observed, it acts very strangely, like a field of waves spread out over all space and time out to infinity in all directions.”
“When you combine quantum physics and relativity, you realize that not everything has to travel slower than light: some particles can actually travel faster than light, and this appears as if they are traveling backward in time.”
“Since tachyons can always be seen as moving at infinite speed, they appear to be a good way of dealing with the phenomenon of spatial nonlocality in quantum physics. That is, between two remote events describing the movement of so-called back-to-back particles in a coherent entanglement, if measurement of one of the particles occurs, the other instantly appears to have been measured, resulting in a correlation between the two measurement events... Because such particles with imaginary masses are confined to speeds in excess of light, they may be seen to play a role in memory processes and a role in feeling intent following the orderly process of thinking... Mind may not arise from the brain, but actually exists in the whole universe – the Mind of God, so to speak, as a tachyonic mind field. Our brains are something like radio receivers that through our actions of intent simply tune in to this greater mind to produce our mundane and, at times, perhaps profound thoughts, feelings, and intuitions and even our five perceptive senses... The key point here is that in quantum physics, we know that observation changes whatever is being observed. Observation is a mind-like event – no mind, no observation. We also know that observation instantly collapses the wave of possibility from a spectrum of many possibilities to an emergence of just one of them. If we are to associate a field with this collapse, it must be a tachyonic field, since this sudden event must occur in a spacelike manner – faster-than-light.”
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews