Foreword

After 100 years of its progress, quantum mechanics still continues to amaze anyone who tries to understand it not restricting himself or herself to mere experimental facts and mathematical machinery. It is appropriate here to mention Richard Feynman, an outstanding physicist, who said that everybody uses the apparatus of quantum mechanics without understanding quantum mechanics. We are already accustomed to that there are efficient algorithms for computing properties of quantum systems without entering into their meaning. The interest to these problems has recently revived in connection with a heavy coverage and expectations associated with a quantum computer. The terms such as mixed states, teleportation, quantum algorithms, and others are becoming familiar not only in the scientific literature but in other fields as well. However, it is difficult to speak about the issues that lack understanding even at a professional level. So far, there have been many attempts to interpret experimental facts from the field of quantum mechanics based on both corpuscular and wave descriptions, involving a pilot wave, and even parallel universes. All these attempts were made because the models intended to logically solve the conflict at the level of the already established notions without interfering with the geneses of these notions. This monograph, written by a psychologist and a physicist, analyzes the process of how our concepts of reality have been formed at the preconscious and conscious levels. The well-known problems in physics are used here as a touchstone for testing the capabilities of the proposed method of psychosemantic analysis. Despite that several postulates of the authors are disputable, the overall monograph deserves attention at least because it is the first attempt to puzzle out the psychological foundation of our physical knowledge. Presumably, the hypotheses proposed by the authors will motivate other researchers to look at the problems in quantum mechanics from another standpoint and notice the aspects yet beyond our field of vision. This monograph will be useful to a wide range of specialists, students, and everybody who is interested in the modern problems in science.