\"Everyday Quantum Reality\" by David Grandy (Non-Fiction)
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introduction. Most people have heard about quantum physics, and it's remarkable, well nigh bizarre claims. One effect of these claims is to suggest that quantum reality is a world apart from everyday experience, that the two realities are discontinuous. In this book, I dispute this outlook by showing that variations of quantum puzzles have long been part of everyday experience. If one is inclined to puzzle over familiar concepts and experiences, puzzles inevitably emerge, and some deepen toward the kinds of issues now touted as unique to quantum physics. I hold that there is no uniqueness, one confined quantum puzzles or variations thereof. In the backyard of everyday experience. One often reads that quantum physics is an abrupt departure from the common sensical understandings of classical free quantum physics. While that may be true in certain instances, the foundational principles of classical physics by positing a deterministic world filled with lifeless objects, directly contradict the stubborn everyday sense that we are something mawr than lifeless objects. Classical physics only makes sense because we implicitly exempt ourselves from its determination that everything issues up from the mechanistic interplay of material particles and by freely exempting ourselves from this metaphysical postulate. We throw its limitations into relief. The postulate does not apply to us in every way. If it did, we would never be the wiser to adapt. One of Epicurious is insights. If we were lifeless entities, we could never know it, for we would be dead even to death. And, of course, to the question of whether we are lifeless autumn a thons, or beings whose fundamental nature transcends mechanical necessity. My point is that classical physics makes sense only if we overlook its assumption of mechanistic lifelessness, and often we do overlook that assumption. But quantum physics, by challenging the claim of a deterministic cosmos, gives us reason to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of classical physics for the assumption of determinism interlocks tightly with that of mechanistic lifelessness, I hope to show that quantum physics open space for ideas that are at once knew and old, new in the sense that they run contrary to those of classical physics and old in the sense that they coincide with everyday experience what some thinkers have called pre conceptual or pre theoretical experience in the quantum tradition. Theorists have long proposed that ordinary objects, tables, chairs and so on come under the sway of quantum reality, just as electrons, photons and Adams do. They also are generally quick to add, however, that the extreme minute nous of quantum effects keeps them from playing into everyday experience, at least to a significant degree. As George Greenstein and Arthur's Science put it, Hidden behind the discreet and independent objects of the sense world is an entangled world in which the simple notions of identity and locality no longer apply. We may not notice the intimate relationship common to that level of experience, but regardless of our blindness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us says random may in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere on this account. While quantum effects operate suddenly and ubiquitously, they do not, in any obvious way play into everyday experience. Hence, we are blind to them. I believe this is only partly true. Granted, quantum effects are minute when measured against, say, the stapler on my desk. But why should that fact keep them from figuring into the way I experience the stapler? Shouldn't those effects, owing to their elemental ubiquity, figure not only into the microscopic structure of physical objects but also into the small scale structure of our perceptual faculties and consequently into the ways we experience the world. If this is the case than our blindness to quantum effects might have a twofold origin. First, they are too small to register at the macro world level, at least if we expect them to show up as phenomena fully removed from us. Second and more fundamentally, they have long been iterated out of sight by their deep familiarity. That is, they are not fully removed from us, but rather intimately. Tish, you'd into our being. They thus pattern the way we know things the way we can know things, even as we do know them.