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Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science. Roland Omnes. Arturo Sangalli, trans. 296 pp. Princeton University Press, 1999. $29.95.
The line separating physics from philosophy, like the one between the quantum world and the classical, is often blurred. Roland Omnes, a distinguished French physicist whose work has centered on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, affirms the connections between the two fields in his latest popular volume, which draws on his own work but places it in a much broader historical and intellectual context.
Omnes believes there is a crisis in epistemology-the philosophy of knowledge-brought on by developments in modern physics. Although his primary emphasis is on quantum mechanics, he also intends his remarks to accommodate general and special relativity. Indeed, the book's scope is even grander, for Omnes takes as his starting point the philosophy, mathematics, logic and science (if it can be called that) of ancient Greece. The book traces, from antiquity to the present, the histories of epistemology, mathematics, logic and science.
Omnes's goal is to show that from its initial grounding in everyday experience -what he refers to alternatively as "common sense" and "intuition"science has become increasingly "formal." According to Omnes, science has become so formalized that it is incompatible with common sense and inexpressible in everyday language. Furthermore, because science is as close as we have yet come to direct contact with Reality (Omnes uses a capital "R"), the fact...