Well, for once, I'm ahead of schedule.....
I finished the fluffy bit about near eastern religious movements quickly and read the preface. There is almost no physics in the preface but it is an attempt to outline the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of Smolin's enterprise. He separates the sheep from the goats by using a series of questions.
1) Does the natural world exist independently of our minds? Well I have to say yes to that, so I agree with him so far.
2) Is the natural world comprehensible to our minds? He says yes. I say that it is comprehensible to the degree exhibited by science but I reserve judgement about complete comprehensibility until such time as there is a complete understanding of all phenomena. I strongly suspect that that goal is not actually achievable.
The fact that I cannot answer yes to both questions places me among the goats, the anti-realists according to him. I think that's overly harsh. I am simply not a naive realist as he claims to be. We've had William Ockham, Hume, and Kant disabusing us of the arrogant conceit that we can know things directly in and of themselves. Naive Platonic Realism as Smolin seems to embrace has been philosophically dead since the 14th century IMO. Mostly it does no harm that it lives, except in the foundations of maths....
He proceeds to say that folks who think about quantum things are not realists since they must say no to one or more of the two questions above. There is then a call to arms, the realist physicist must go beyond QM because QM must be incomplete.
The antirealists are then classified:
- radical antirealists like Bohr who believe that particle properties are created by our interaction with them
- quantum epistemologists believe that quantum physics is merely about the knowledge we have of the particles
- operationalists like Heisenberg who believe that QM is about the questions we can ask particles
I can't go as far as Bohr. I'm happy with operationalism. So that's the kind of goat that I am.
A third question is introduced to further distinguish among the realists:
3) Does the universe look mostly like the everyday world we see?
If yes then you are a full member of his naive realist clique. If not, and you think reality is very different from what we see then you can be a non naive realist who believes in:
- multiverse string theorists
- well i think we don't know Reality from what we see we only know reality and I don't believe in many worlds or multiverses
- I'm sure there are other POVs
Nice things, agreeably put, are said about science and religion not really being enemies (except for the extremists, of course).
The preface concludes by describing how Part 1 describes the triumph of Bohr and Heisenberg views over Einsteins. Part 2 describes the revival of realist approaches by Bohm and Bell. Part 3 sketches attempts to complete a realist theory of everything.