Dialectics in Modern Physics

A substantial philosophical treatment of relativity, quantum mechanics, causality and measurement, by the man who ran the department of philosophical problems of science at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

M. E. Omelyanovsky wanted to be read abroad as a colleague rather than as a commissar, and the book was written to make that possible. His preface lists the international venues where he had presented parts of it: the world philosophy congresses at Vienna in 1968 and Varna in 1973, the journal Foundations of Physics in 1972, and a colloquium of the Belgian Academy of Sciences in Brussels in 1975. The intended reader is a Western physicist or philosopher of science.

On its own terrain it is serious work. The chapters on the measurement problem, on the status of the wave function, on causality and statistical law, and on the relation between classical and quantum description engage the actual literature and the actual difficulties rather than issuing verdicts.

He wrote it under difficulty, and says so in the Russian preface: he had to finish while seriously ill, and omitted much he had meant to include.

A note on dating. Omelyanovsky states in his first sentence that this translates his Russian monograph of 1973, with a short concluding chapter added. The addition is larger than he says: post-1973 material appears in seven of the twelve chapters. Argue the body from 1973 and the concluding matter from 1976-78.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.