On the Quantum Mechanics of the Human Intellect and the Stories It Crea

On the Quantum Mechanics of the Human Intellect and the Stories It CreatesIf human beings are to explore those distant and wished for lands, we must first come to grips with some of the perplexing conceptual issues that have dogged quantum physics since its inception. These riddles dance around the enigma of quantum observership. Its contemplation brings us back from the earth of the multiverse to the intimate confines of our own skin, where we ask what it means to say that we observe nature.- Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang A State-of-the-Universe(s) ReportDuring the crisis of modern science in the belatedly nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the postulates of early scientific discoveries had been refuted. In one of sciences most defining moments, an undisturbed photon of light was found to award both wave-like and particulate qualities. The relationship between these two qualities would later be termed complementarity by Niels Bohr, one of the scientists at the forefro nt of this discovery. As doubting Thomas S. Kuhn notes in The building of Scientific Revolutions, Before the theory of quantum mechanics was developed by Plank, Einstein, and others early in the twentieth century, physics texts taught that light was transverse wave motion (12). So staggering was this discovery that in his autobiography, Albert Einstein recounts, All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundations of physics to the new quantum knowns failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have been built. Not surprisingly, this arrest of the fundamental postulates of classical physics sparked a reevaluation of the world view by the ... ...e and the nature of things to help us to connect ourselves to stories of the past and present while trying to do exactly what Petrus Camper and the scholars of the eighteenth-century were so capable ofthe same privilege the wave-particle theor y gave to the pioneers of quantum mechanics to extrapolate the multiverse of intellectual disciplines together.Works CitedEhrlich, Gretel. Islands, the Universe, Home.New York Penguin, 1991. Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York Simon & Schuster, 1997.Gould, Stephen Jay. Bully for Brontosaurus.New York W.W. Norton, 1991.I Have Landed The End of a Beginning in Natural History.New York Harmony, 2002. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.ChicagoChicago U, 1996. Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind.New York Ballantine, 1991.