Stayin' alive with quantum physics

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7452.1385-a

BMJ 2004;328:1385 (5 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7452.1385-a

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Stayin' alive with quantum physics

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Discos have always been rather an ordeal for me. I am musicallydyslexic and, in the tribal society of adolescence, I shouldrightly have been considered disabled. Instead, at school Iplayed rugby and read "nerdish" books. One was the incisiveChance and Necessity by Jacques Monod. Man is a machine, heasserted, and free will an illusion

Later, when I made the crossover from theoretical physics tomedicine, I was surprised by the aggressive nihilism of thebiologists' world view—for example, Richard Dawkins'spithy remark that "the world has precisely the properties onewould expect if there is [at its root] nothing but blind, pitilessindifference."

Consciousness, it seems, is a rather tragic Darwinian epiphenomenon.Free will is likewise illusory in a universe that is merelya game of Newtonian billiard balls—its outcome determinedat that first, bleak, break of time. And its author is eitherlong gone, or . . . [Full text of this article]

Kevin Barraclough, general practitioner

Painswick, Gloucestershire

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