The Self-Aware Universe

Making final adjustments to the Quantumology manuscript today brought back to mind this remarkable book by Amit Goswami. I'm now going to open the book at random, having fetched it out of the bookcase for the edit exercise, and quote here a line from one of the two pages which lie in front of me: (You'll just have to trust that I'm not going to search for anything juicy or relevant, for to do that would defeat the object of the exercise!)

Neils Bohr once said: "Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it." That shock yields to understanding as we begin to comprehend the play of the complementarity principle.

This is from page 73, the rest of the spread being dedicated to turning a W into an eagle as an illustration of electron behaviour, and a description of photon behaviour in light beams, both referencing the nature of wave-particle duality. Goswami is a physicist, and he cannot help but talk in terms physicists would use, but you won't find many equations in his book (I can't remember any at all but I'm not going through to check that now!) and that's one of the reasons I found it so readable. If you are a scientist, and you want to know how quantum mechanics can possibly be affiliated to consciousness, this book will explain why it would appear totally impossible that it doesn't. If you're not a scientist, you're here now, and that means you want to know how your thoughts and the quantum world co-habit spacetime, so you'll probably want to read this book, too.

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