What Is Real
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What Is Real?
"A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science." --New York Times Book Review An Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review Longlisted for PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Longlisted for Goodreads Choice Award Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's solipsistic and poorly reasoned Copenhagen interpretation. Indeed, questioning it has long meant professional ruin, yet some daring physicists, such as John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett, persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth. "An excellent, accessible account." --Wall Street Journal "Splendid. . . . Deeply detailed research, accompanied by charming anecdotes about the scientists." --Washington Post
What Is Real
Dex Pratt’s life has been turned upside down. His parents have divorced and his mother has remarried. When his father attempts suicide and fails, Dex returns to their small town to care for him. But he’s not prepared for how much everything has changed. Gone are the nice house, new cars, fancy bikes and other toys. Now he and his wheelchair-bound dad live in a rotting rented house at the back of a cornfield. And, worse, his father has given up defending marijuana growers in his law practice and has become one himself. Unable to cope, Dex begins smoking himself into a state of surrealism. He begins to lose touch with what is real and what he is imagining. And then there are the aliens...and the girl-of-his-dreams...and the crop circle...
What is Real
I t is possible to select the bulk, as I well as the most real part, of one's mental atmosphere. This may be more readily illustrated than proved. For example, I have in mind a certain image of a house, the windows of which overlook in the far distance some beautiful hills. In front of those hills there may be seen in the fall waving fields of yellow wheat. In the immediate foreground of the picture is a great stretch of smooth green grass. But in the middle distance is a row of horrid little tenements — five-room houses — built as cheaply and kept as wretchedly as possible. The inhabitants of that house, whenever they looked out of the windows, at first saw very prominently the dirty little tenements. They stared at them in all their ugliness. Presently, however, these people discovered that it was possible not to perceive the tenements at all, but, by deliberately directing the vision beyond, to enjoy the hills and the waving wheat and the green grass. It was not so much a question as to which view first caught the eye, as it was a question of which view should take hold and endure. The view from those windows became a symbol in that family of the resolute holding in mind of the things in life that are beautiful instead of those that are ugly, of things that are pleasant as contrasted with those that are disagreeable, of the things that are true as opposed to those that are untrue.