Gary Zukav’s timeless, humorous, New York Times bestselling masterpiece, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, is arguably the most widely acclaimed. The Dancing. Wu Li Masters. An Overview of the New Physics. Gary Zukav. A BANTAM NEW AGE BOOK. BANTAM BOOKS. NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON. The most exciting intellectual adventure I’ve been on since reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”—.

For some systems, such as a single quantum particle moving in three-dimensional space, the full definition of the Hilbert space can be ignored for some purposes, and the wave function can be thought of as a function that assigns a single number to each point in three-dimensional space-but even then the number is a complex number, which is sort of a “two-dimensional” number all by itself, so saying that the wave function is in three-dimensional space is at best misleading. I can be a scientist using Newtonian physics to make a career, judge student performance and the like, and also believe in God, angels, fairies and so on.

Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav

In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters, and writers are all members mastres the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. But this does not take away the fact that the new theories, uw radically departed from what was “new physics” at the time of publishing of this book, still corroborates his base arguments.

Physics used to be my favourite subject in my pre-engineering career sadly, Engineering did kill that part in me which thought academic study can be someone’s career.

The physics zuiav and laboratories of this century might have meditation lessons and yogic experiments The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene superstring theory of quantum gravity To some degree each of the three physics books cover the same ground, but Zukav excels at surveying the history of physics and at describing Einstein’s three important contributions.

Snow referred to as the problem of the “two cultures”. National Book Award in category of Science. Mar 05, Nick Wallace rated it did not like it.

“The Dancing Wu Li Masters”

Whenever we bump into the limits of out self-imposed cognitive reality, the result is always a paradox. But we are only part of nature, not all of it, so there is much of “nature” that is not us, which was there before we were born and will be there after we die-in other words, “there is an external world which exists apart from us”. All the pilot wave theory says is that the fundamental units of physics are particles, which act just like “real” classical particles in that they have definite positions and velocities at all times and move along definite trajectories, and “pilot waves”, which flow along with the particles and guide their trajectories in order to keep the results of experiments consistent with quantum statistics.

The other thing that grates is that he thinks the book is very funny. Sweet rated it really liked it. I can’t help mentioning also, thought it isn’t strictly germane to a review of Zukav’s book, that I personally have never understood why quantum logic was thought to be such a breakthrough.

Peter Donis Web Site - Philosophy Review: The Dancing Wu Li Masters

And it would come as quite a surprise to all those “technician” scientists to be told that what they were doing was not part of the search for the true nature of reality. That said, the book wasn’t what I was expecting. Einstein doesnt like it. At times he’s so eager to jump hary the scientific and philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics that he sprints past the reader’s understanding. That’s quite a feat.

You silly, silly, New Age people, just stop.

Many people believe that “discovery” is wwu an act of creation. The bit about scientific theories being constrained by the results of experiments masrers what gets lost when Zukav starts waxing poetical about the philosophy of quantum mechanics.

We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. The fact that a wave function that has just collapsed because of a measurement made on a quantum system can have a special mathematical form is also somewhat misleading as Zukav uses it here.

Wave functions do not exist in the ordinary three-dimensional space that we perceive; they exist in an abstract mathematical space called Hilbert space.

The Wu Li masters philosophy is interesting too! Armchair philosophers throughout history have come up with ideas like “we are part of nature”, but nobody before Newton came up with the inverse square law of gravity, nobody before Einstein came up with the curved spacetime picture of general relativity, nobody before Heisenberg came up with the uncertainty principle.

It was tough reading a book concerning “new” physics written over 30 years ago. Woit, evidently tearing his hair out, says that both books are still selling well, and that, although S-matrix theory is now completely discredited, it embarrassingly lives on as “nutty New Age philosophy”.

Oct 11, S.

Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (Perennial Classics)

His views are also shared, at least to an extent, by some contemporary physicists and philosophers, many of whom are named in the Acknowledgments to the book, and who read over it at Zukav’s request-some only parts, but at least four read the entire manuscript and offered extensive comments. The average layperson could learn the basics of complicated physics from this book, easily.

By my comments so far I have certainly placed myself into the first group, whereas Zukav, by his own admission, belongs to the second. What we perceive determines what we ,asters to be true. The old physics assumes that there is an external world which exists apart from us. Made an otherwise complicated subject readily readable for me, even eager for more. Then Zukav followed Capra, and wrote this book.