The Quantum Enigma, a Decades-Old Cat Gone Elephant in a Room of Science, to Be Reported Unriddled in 2020

Albert Einstein, who disliked quantum theory and found it incomplete, himself caused its enigma imaginally, but his relativity theory helps unriddle it beautifully—reveals the new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge

December 3, 2019, Greater Boston, MA—In a forthcoming major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge and of Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Ph.D., will report having unriddled a century-old puzzle in science, the so-called quantum enigma. His book will offer a relativistic solution in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework.

Tamdgidi’s book, Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, to be released on January 20, 2020, opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s cat box of the quantum enigma after decades, finding something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts.

According to the author, “the famous light-chasing thought experiment Albert Einstein self-reportedly made when young in 1895 and again in 1905, inspiring his theorizations of relativity, contained an historical asynchronicity that has not been noticed before and points to how the quantum enigma was seeded.” 

“The problem,” Tamdgidi argues, “is that the 1905 Einstein writing his first miracle-year paper on light, where his notion of its wave-particle duality was reported, never asked whether the light he was imaginally chasing in 1905 or even back in 1895 was a particle or a wave. Instead, he referred to light as a beam at the time and also in his retrospective reporting of his 1895 youthful thought experiment, even though in 1895 light was still undisputedly considered to be a wave and not a particle moving as a beam.” 

“Had he written his third 1905 miracle-year paper on relativity first,” the author quips ironically, “Einstein may have found a relativistic solution to his puzzle about light’s duality that seeded the quantum enigma.”  

Tamdgidi continues, “the light beam Einstein imagined chasing was actually chasing him as well. In fact the bidirectionally waving beam in his reference frame was also at once a wave spreading out in all directions in its own reference frame.”

In the author’s view, Einstein’s notion of the wave-particle duality of light (which was shaped in the course of advancing his relativity theory) and its associated “complementarity principle” (later coined by Niels Bohr), and several other resulting notions, are false narratives—astonishing blunders in science in fact—despite the quantum theory being, rightly so, the most tested and confirmed scientific theory. This is because, according to Tamdgidi, the photon is always an electromagnetic wave and the question really is about how the same wave can at once be a localized object flashing by as a beam, and a spread out object moving in all directions like a ripple in the universal pond. 

In fact, as odd as it sounds, but not so according to Einstein’s otherwise beautiful theorizations of relativity, Tamdgidi states, we live inside what we consider to be tiny photons flashing by.

According to the author, the quantum enigma is a result of our dualistic, ideologically constructed and habitually leftover (at times hypnotically perpetuated as in our double-slit experiments), classical Newtonian ways of imagining reality. 

Tamdgidi concludes, “the reported findings of the book offering a relativistic solution to the quantum enigma may be significant for resolving other puzzles in physics, including its failures so far in unifying relativity and quantum field theory. The basic lesson here is that without a self-reflective, transdisciplinary, and transcultural approach across the natural and social sciences and the humanities, human problems (including those in science) will never be adequately solved. Consciousness inescapably matters—not in a spooky, but in a reasonable, way. The ‘theory of everything’ will never result from just pure physics.”

The book, the first in the new monograph series “Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation” of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (vol. XIII), will be released on Jan. 20, 2020, by Okcir Press, an imprint of Ahead Publishing House (Belmont, MA): 6×9 in., 1000 pages, references, illustrations., bibliography, and index, LCCN: 2019914517, ISBNs: 9781640980105 (hardcover), 9781640980112 (softcover), 9781640980129 (epub ebook), and 9781640980136 (pdf ebook). 

It can be ordered from major online bookstores worldwide. Educational, library, and volume order discounts are available for upfront orders placed directly through the Okcir Store. The store offers free domestic US shipping. For international orders and other ordering inquiries please contact orders[at]okcir.com.

For the table of contents of this book visit here.


Reviews

“Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations, Volume 1, Unriddling the Quantum Enigma hits the proverbial nail on the head of an ongoing problem not only in sociology but also much social science—namely, many practitioners’ allegiance, consciously or otherwise, to persisting conceptions of ‘science’ that get in the way of scientific and other forms of theoretical advancement. Newtonianism has achieved the status of an idol and its methodology a fetish, the consequence of which is an ongoing failure to think through important problems of uncertainty, indeterminacy, multivariation, multidisciplinarity, and false dilemmas of individual agency versus structure, among many others. Tamdgidi has done great service to social thought by bringing to the fore this problem of disciplinary decadence and offering, in effect, a call for its teleological suspension—thinking beyond disciplinarity—through drawing upon and communicating with the resources of quantum theory not as a fetish but instead as an opening for other possibilities of social, including human, understanding. The implications are far-reaching as they offer, as the main title attests, liberating sociology from persistent epistemic shackles and thus many disciplines and fields connected to things ‘social.’ This is exciting work. A triumph! The reader is left with enthusiasm for the second volume and theorists of many kinds with proverbial work to be done.” — Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and author of Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge/Paradigm, 2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, forthcoming 2020)

“Social sciences are still using metatheoretical models of science based on 19th century newtonian concepts of “time and space”. Mohammad H. Tamdgidi has produced a ‘tour de force’ in social theory leaving behind the old newtonian worldview that still informs the social sciences towards a 21st century non-dualistic, non-reductionist, transcultural, transdisciplinary, post-Einsteinian quantum concept of TimeSpace. Tamdgidi goes beyond previous efforts done by titans of social theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Kyriakos Kontopoulos. This book is a quantum leap in the social sciences at large. Tamdgidi decolonizes the social sciences away from its Eurocentric colonial foundations bringing it closer not only to contemporary natural sciences but also to its convergence with the old Eastern philosophical and mystical worldviews. This book is a masterpiece in social theory for a 21st century decolonial social science. A must read!” Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, University of California at Berkeley​​​​​​​

“Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology succeeds in adding physical structures to the breadth of the world-changing vision of C. Wright Mills, the man who mentored me at Columbia. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can help us to understand the human universe no less than the physical universe. Just as my Creating Life Before Death challenges bureaucracy’s conformist orientation, so does Liberating Sociology“liberate the infinite possibilities inherent in us.” Given our isolation in  the Coronavirus era, we have time to follow Tamdgidi in his journey into the depth of inner space, where few men have gone before. It is there that we can gain emotional strength, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Mandela empowered themselves. That personal development was needed to address not only their own personal problems, but also the mammoth problems of their societies. We must learn to do the same.”  Bernard Phillips, Emeritus Sociology Professor, Boston University


About the author:

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (pronounced ‘tamjidi’), Ph.D., has previously authored Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism (Routledge/Paradigm) and Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (Palgrave Macmillan). Formerly an associate professor of sociology at UMass Boston specializing in social theory, he is the founding director and editor of OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics) (est. 2002, www.okcir.com) and its scholarly journal, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699). Tamdgidi holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology in conjunction with a graduate certificate in Middle Eastern studies from Binghamton University (SUNY). He received his B.A. in architecture from U.C. Berkeley, following enrollment as an undergraduate student of civil engineering in the Technical College of the University of Tehran, Iran.


Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations

Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699)
Volume XIII, 2020, Monograph Series: Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation

Author: Mohammad H. Tamdgidi
Publication Date: January 20, 2020

Published by: Okcir Press (an imprint of Ahead Publishing House), Belmont, Massachusetts

First Edition, 1000 pages • 6×9 inches • Includes references, illustrations, bibliography, and index

Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2019914517
ISBN-13: 9781640980105 • ISBN−10: 1640980105 (hard cover: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 9781640980112 • ISBN−10: 1640980113 (soft cover: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 9781640980129 • ISBN−10: 1640980121 (ePub ebook)
ISBN-13: 9781640980136 • ISBN−10: 164098013X (PDF ebook)


Press Release:  Transdisciplinary Sociologist to Report the Quantum Enigma Unriddled in 2020

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