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Poorly organized, poorly written, woolly thinking
This book is annoyingly poorly written. It doesn't explain, it obscures. It is muddled and disorganized. It introduces concepts without explaining them until some chapters later. Some important concepts have incorrect explanations, or no explanation at all. The book insults the careful thinking of 4 centuries of physicists. Worse, it insults the intellect of the reader. I would be ashamed to have people think I learned about quantum physics from this book, because that would imply that I do not know what "learning" means. The only thing I learned from this book is to avoid other books by this author.
He takes on an ambitious task. But he doesn't succeed. While avoiding even the simplest equations, he also says to the reader in effect "you wouldn't understand what the math expresses, so just trust me that it is deep and obscure and organic and dancing and only in our minds anyway". In my opinion the average reader may not know the math symbols, but is intelligent enough to understand a clear explanation. Unfortunately too many of Zukav's explanations are not clear.
Let's take the title as a case in point. He describes that the Chinese characters for Physics, "Wu Li", are ambiguous. This is not true because the tone in Chinese is a part of a word's identity. He doesn't know what he's talking about. But it gets worse. One of the possible meanings for the characters, he states, are "Wu"=matter or energy, and "Li"=organic patterns, such as woodgrain. Fine, but then he says "Wu Li" = patterns of organic energy. This is wrong, it is the patterns, not the energy, that are organic. Then later he says that "organic" = "conscious", and that therefore subatomic particles are organic and conscious, so by studying them we can learn more about ourselves. His logic evades me.
In discussing the famous 2-slit experiment, he avoids the obvious possibility that photons can exhibit wave-like behaviour. He keeps saying "but we KNOW they are particles, not waves". If physicists do "know" it, it is not at all convincingly explained in this book. Yet this is the most fundamental and important basis of quantum theory. If somehow I missed his explanation, then that confirms his writing is unclear.
He confuses the nature of statistical descriptions. He alternates between saying "this is not an explanation, it is a description of probabilities" and saying "there is nothing in the universe to explain, everything is a construct of our imagination". I could go on.
By contrast, an easy-to-read nontechnical explanation of quantum theory is "QED" by Richard Feynman (spelling?), who gained a Nobel Prize in this area.
December 2001 · Books