The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality Book

This book explores the implications for physics and philosophy of a strange new fact of nature: that particles can be "entangled" over enormous distances, and that measurements made on such entangled particles in one place can have an instantaneous effect in another. Such interactions seem to (but actually do not, as the authors show) violate the principle that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, which is why Einstein called them "spooky interactions at a distance." The authors provide the necessary background to understand these "nonlocal" interactions, and explain the experiments that confirmed their existence. They discuss how the nonlocal effects depend on the fundamental complementarity of natural phenomena, such as the wave-particle duality. They go on to show that the results have profound implications for our understanding of the foundations of physics and for our view of the universe. In particular, they argue that consciousness can no longer be divorced from our understanding of the way nature works, and they illustrate this new epistemological approach with an attempt to resolve some ambiguities in our view of the origin and evolution of the universe.Read More