Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

A physics note [UPDATED]




Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern looks like a good introduction to some of the physics concepts Robert Anton Wilson takes up in his books. And look who shows up in the index. Amazon won't let me see the passage in question, but I think it's about The Universe Next Door in Schroedinger's Cat.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker supplies the relevant passage, noting, "When Amazon's book search fails, Google Books will often pick up the slack."


1 comment:

michael said...

I read that book. The citation isn't as good as John Gribbin's in _In Search of Schrodinger's Cat_, p.288, the annotated bibliography that sings praise of RAW and SCT.

RAW is also mentioned in popular physics books such as:
-How The Hippies Saved Physics (Kaiser): 106-107
-The Quantum Moment (Crease): 302 (another footnote about writers in pop kulch who use Schrodinger's Cat)

My favorite recent RAW spotting is not in a book about physics, and RAW isn't mentioned (although it is him):
-Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited. by Proctor and Schiebinger. p.1 (Proctor is writing about all of our epistemologies - his -ology has to do with non-knowing, - and in his Google search he turned up some wild varieties of epistemologies. He says his favorite branch is "erotometaphysical epistemology." He doesn't mention RAW explicitly, but it's on p.240 of SCT, omnibus edition.

Have you guys seen Erik Davis's entry on RAW in _The Occult World_, edited by Christopher Partridge? It's a fat, scholarly "reference" book and pretty damned cool. Partridge is a major figure and editor of books on religion. See pp.331-335. Davis says RAW shouldn't be ignored. It's a fine entry, mostly a well-written bio.