Recovering Rational Science
Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism
by Carver A. Mead
Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: MIT Press, 2000
(135 pages; $30.00, hardcover)
reviewed by David Haddon
The last seven decades ofthe twentieth century will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics.” With these opening words of his MIT monograph Collective Electrodynamics, California Institute of Technology professor Carver Mead throws down the gauntlet to loyalists of the Copenhagen School of quantum physics of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Mead, as one of the late twentieth century’s leading experimental physicists, bids to revitalize theoretical physics for the twenty-first century while incidentally purging it of the “formalism” and “irrationalism” of the Copenhagen School.
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David Haddon is an author from Redding, California, who has written for InterVarsity Press and Baker Book House and whose articles have appeared in Christianity Today, National Review, and Learning. He holds a B.S. in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in politics and literature from the University of Dallas.
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