We have difficulty in contemplating events of our everyday lives as quantum phenomena.
Yet, the principles of quantum physics are an essential component of what is happening around us. We still tend to see our world operating within the empirical science that is based upon seventeenth century, Newtonian cause and effect, mechanical physics and the Cartesian split of mind and body.
Leaders need to understand and embrace what we know of reality through quantum physics, cosmology, neuroscience and the evolution of consciousness. Principles of quantum physics have led to high technologies like lasers, transistors and CAT scans but we have difficulty in figuring out and translating our thoughts of these 'subatomic' matter processes into our business language.
Way back in 1900, physicist Max Planck wrote a mathematical formula, on a postcard to a friend, that introduced to the world the notion of tiny, discrete bundles of energy, which behaved both as waves and as particles, and came to be known as quanta.
This formula has become the basis of quantum physics, the strange new science that tells us reality is discontinuous and deeply paradoxical---a reality that doesn't follow the cause and effect rules of our ordinary empirical science.
Now, Lewis Little’s long-awaited book, The Theory of Elementary Waves: A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics, will revolutionize the science of sub-atomic physics. It is as ground-breaking as Benoit Mandelbrot’s Fractal Geometry and even more radical in overturning 80 years of bad science. Little writes for the intelligent layman, so you can follow his discussion of a field that has often posed as being too obscure and anti-intuitive for the common mind to grasp.
But anything real can be explained, and Little spares no words in tearing down the edifice of magical thinking that permeates quantum mechanics and then erecting a new structure of reasoning from real, physical action and reaction that, as he puts it, “any 8th-grader can understand.”