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The Laboratory of the Mind by James Robert Brown, Routledge, pp 208,
£30

Science is full of ‘thought experiments’. All the evidence suggests
that Galileo, for example, never did drop a cannonball and a musket ball
from the leaning tower of Pisa, but used the hypothetical example to make
a point about the nature of gravity. Similarly, Einstein never was in a
lift falling freely down its shaft, but he knew what would happen in such
circumstances. And, of course, Schrodinger, whatever his alleged faults,
absolutely never, ever, shut a cat up in a box with a phial of poison.

The immediate attraction of James Brown’s splendid little book is that
it gathers together many such tales in an entertaining overview of how scientists
(mainly physicists) think about nature. Regarded simply as entertainment,
this volume is excellent value, and the highlight is Brown’s delicious extrapolation
of Schrodinger’s cat experiment to incorporate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
‘paradox’ applied to two kittens. I intend to steal this lock, stock and
barrel to include in my next book.

But there is more to The Laboratory of the Mind than entertainment.
Brown is interested in the nature of scientific and mathematical thought.
He leads the reader gently through discussions of what is going on when
we formulate laws and hypotheses, and where our intuitions come from – so
very gently that even I could cope with it. I can dazzle my friends with
my philosophical contemplations concerning the reality of teapots.

The only place where things get at all tough is in the final chapter,
‘Quantum mechanics: a Platonic interpretation’. Here, the author lays his
cards on the table, and we find out that what he is really selling is his
own interpretation of the underlying paradoxes and puzzles of the quantum
world.

It looks as good an explanation as any, and better than some. Those
with a specialist irerest in such matters will be intrigued. But even if
you neither understand nor believe any of this (like Kathleen, to whom the
book is dedicated), you can still enjoy the rest of it as an informative
good read.