Dave's book review for Escape from Shadow Physics

Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist. I don’t know what I’m talking about in this review.

This was a random pick from the shelves of my local library. I fell in love with it pretty much immediately. I read the first five pages in a park before we even got home. I’m like, "who is this guy?" and according to the back flap, Adam Kay has "two PhDs, one in literature from the University of Cambridge and the other in mathematics from the University of Oxford," and that explains a lot. My guy can write.

If nothing else, this is a wonderful summary of the history and present state of physics. I learned so much. The breadth and depth of the scholarship made it worth my time and Kay’s excellent explanations made me feel like I was understanding subjects that have usually been kinda off-limits (or explained in hand-wavy ways) to non-experts.

Beyond that, I was struck at how good this book was at building up a case for classical physics. The whole thing unfolds with example after example of wrong-but-useful models we’ve had for understanding our universe and each example or parable builds on the previous.

It’s got fascinating twists and turns as scientists struggled with the "particle versus wave" nature of light over the centuries. One side will win with a definitive victory, and then the other side will win, and then back again. Each time, our understanding deepens to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, Kay is slowly revealing the recent developments in a new field of droplet experiments. In these, droplets of water or oil dance or "walk" on the surface of a vibrating bath of the same fluid. Their behavior combines elements of both wave and particle motion - at least somewhat analogous to the aspects of light that baffled us for centuries. The droplet experiments may never end up explaining sub-atomic phenomena, but but the mere existence of a plausible physical analogy, no matter how remote, suggests that this sort of thing does happen in the real universe.

At around the midpoint of the book, we reach Auguste Comte and positivism. Comte declared that we cannot know the underlying causes of many of science’s big questions at the time. And Kay points out that Comte was dead wrong about that. We did eventually learn the causes of disease (viruses and bacteria) or what heat is (motion).

And yet, the positivist approach is unquestionably the mainstream position of physics today.

My brain nearly exploded when I finally fully understood that all of those crazy-sounding theories about multiple universes and "our thoughts create the world" and all that stuff exist solely to explain why quantum mechanics is a "complete" system with no underlying causes. Did you know that?

The full title of this book is Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory and I think the "Dark Ages" part is not being hyperbolic. I’m convinced that future history will be any more kind to with the positivists in our era than it is to positivists of previous eras.

It is absolutely wild to read this book and then go read anything else about quantum physics. Kay is right, there is some absolutely bonkers stuff that is taken as gospel by mainstream physicists. It filters down into our popular understanding through encyclopedias, science popularizers, and media coverage. Anything notion that quantum theory is incomplete (and reality as we understand it exists) might as well be heresy. It’s like we’re back in Galileo’s 1500s except quantum theory is now the dominant religion.

I would be fascinating to know if there’s a good-faith argument against what’s in this book that can be explained at a similar layman’s technical level.

Highly recommended with the caveat that I have no way of knowing if any of it is correct. On the other hand, I’m not sure anyone else does either.