📖Second-hand book "What is Real" [90% new]

- Editor's Recommendation -

★Ettore Majorana - Italian theoretical physicist, described by Fermi as "a genius comparable to Galileo and Newton, but who does not understand human nature and reason."

★His mysterious disappearance triggered a fascinating philosophical discussion on the question of “truth” in this book, which is a wonderful encounter between physics and philosophy.

★ "Once we assume that the true state of a system is itself unknowable, statistical models become indispensable and can only replace reality."

★It can be called the "sister book" of Alain Badiou's "In Search of the Vanishing Reality". The difference is that Badiou used mathematical theory, while Agamben approached it from the perspective of physics.

★Special appendix: Majorana’s article “The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences” which he gave up publishing.

- Introduction -

At 10:30 pm on March 25, 1938, Ettore Majorana boarded a steamship of the Tierrania Company in Naples and set off for Palermo. He had already taught theoretical physics at the University of Naples for a year. From the moment the ship set sail, this leading physicist of his generation disappeared, leaving only unverified rumors and speculations.

The assumption we want to make is that if quantum mechanics relies on the convention that reality must be obscured by probability, then disappearance is the only way in which reality can escape the calculation of probability and be unquestionably established as real. Majorana made himself a unique symbol of the nature of reality in the probabilistic universe of contemporary physics, and in this way created an event that was both absolutely real and unlikely. On a night in March 1938, he decided to disappear without a trace and to make the clues to his disappearance confusing and unverifiable. In this action, he posed to science a question that remains difficult to answer but inescapable to this day: What is real?

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