Quantum Legacies Dispatches from an Uncertain World

I'm reading a book right now called Quantum uh I lost the last name of it um it's by David Kaiser and it's it's sort of about he's he's a physicist in this historian and it's sort of about the different arcs of quantum thinking and all the different things that have happened along the way and it's both the the specifics and the sort of the philosophy of it and this notion that you know there's this big struggle in quantum physics today around you know the big bang starting 14 billion years ago and the different philosophies of or the different thesis I don't want to say I guess they're theories I was going to say thesis but I guess they're really theories of well what happened immediately before the big bang and if the universe is the universe really infinite or is it finite and then there's now the multiple parallel universe theory that is picking up some steam is that there's this continual instantiation of multiple parallel universes and this whole notion that is a as a human being right you know our lifespan is less than uh less than 100 years or 100 years would be a very long life for somebody and the idea that we're 14 billion years into the existing universe that we're in as current uh uh quantum philosophy has and then on top of all of that the notion that if you sort of scale way back and look at it it's kind of no different than in some ways a different flavor of religion right it's the creation myth of the universe and the role of humans in the context of the universe and today we have such a deep understanding in just in the last 100 years of so much more of what's going on than you know 2000 years ago in terms of the mechanics of everything but if you go back 2000 years and you think about this notion of meaning those patterns play out over and over and over again right the the Joseph Campbell hero arc the incredibly successful person who dies unhappy or or penniless or some tragedy occurs along the way and even though they had incredible success um you know the loss of child family country whatever i mean these things just play out over and over and over again and we imbue so much meaning in them philosophy and studying philosophy and applying it to our lives gives us a moment to really step back and go deeper on the meaning to us forget about the meaning to everyone else forget about what we're told is important but that introspection and playing around with it is is so powerful