You don't sound negative to me but, rather, accurate and factual.
I am no physicist but rather a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years until 2015).
The only physics I know I learned in 1966-1967 Physics 1a/2a/3a at UCLA, which was the easier physics sequence for non-physics majors who planned to go on to medical school or graduate study in other scientific disciplines.
I made up the word "Quantations" for my book to describe a compendium of quotations I'd been gathering since I was in college in the 1960s (indeed, I actually used yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines I'd gotten in the habit of keeping in file folders back then) that in large part centered around quantum physics.
I included many of my own thoughts, "pseudo-philosophical fluff" being a perfect description and one I'm going to use in the future, BTW.
Since my teenage years the mystery of quantum physics and its related tangents and intersections with so-called "reality" has been of much interest to me.
The philosophical explorations and musings of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and their peers and successors continue to offer glimpses of other possible ways of viewing the universe and being.
"BS" is a fair way to describe non-mathematical, non-quantitative attempts to render quantum mechanics into everyday language.
As Richard Feynman remarked in 1964 in The Messenger Lectures at MIT, "... I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
I actually crossed paths with Richard Feynman in 1980 when I was an anesthesiology resident at UCLA Medical Center: he was about to undergo surgery for removal of a cancerous abdominal mass and I happened to be standing in a corridor as he was wheeled into the operating room.
He died in 1989 at age 69 of sequelae of that cancer.
This is a fantastic response. Just wondering, if they exist, what would you say are the broad overlaps between anesthesiology and QM are? I know Stuart Hameroff, another anesthesiologist, did a bunch of speculative work on the Orch OR front, so I'd assume there must be some connection of ag least some quality that makes both fields attractive to the same kind of person.
I'm SO glad you commented because it prompted me to look into what Hameroff has been up to recent years.
He and I are contemporaries: he's a year older. I've followed his career since his early publications in the 1980s when he was an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Medical School Department of Anesthesiology and just beginning his exploration of microtubules that later became the focus of his and Roger Penrose's investigations.
Hameroff's inquiries began with what is still a mystery: how does general anesthesia work?:
A zillion theories have come and gone and we still don't know.
I suspect that the answer is intimately linked to how consciousness happens, still the "hard problem" as David Chalmers so perfectly described it in 1995.
I don't know of any other anesthesiologist(s) interested in the confluence of QM and anesthesia.
Someone better get on this horse 'cause Hameroff is 75 and I'm 74 and who knows how much longer we'll keep banging on this drum.
Below, a guide to exploring the work of Hameroff and Penrose.
You don't sound negative to me but, rather, accurate and factual.
I am no physicist but rather a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years until 2015).
The only physics I know I learned in 1966-1967 Physics 1a/2a/3a at UCLA, which was the easier physics sequence for non-physics majors who planned to go on to medical school or graduate study in other scientific disciplines.
I made up the word "Quantations" for my book to describe a compendium of quotations I'd been gathering since I was in college in the 1960s (indeed, I actually used yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines I'd gotten in the habit of keeping in file folders back then) that in large part centered around quantum physics.
I included many of my own thoughts, "pseudo-philosophical fluff" being a perfect description and one I'm going to use in the future, BTW.
Since my teenage years the mystery of quantum physics and its related tangents and intersections with so-called "reality" has been of much interest to me.
The philosophical explorations and musings of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and their peers and successors continue to offer glimpses of other possible ways of viewing the universe and being.
"BS" is a fair way to describe non-mathematical, non-quantitative attempts to render quantum mechanics into everyday language.
As Richard Feynman remarked in 1964 in The Messenger Lectures at MIT, "... I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
I actually crossed paths with Richard Feynman in 1980 when I was an anesthesiology resident at UCLA Medical Center: he was about to undergo surgery for removal of a cancerous abdominal mass and I happened to be standing in a corridor as he was wheeled into the operating room.
He died in 1989 at age 69 of sequelae of that cancer.