Introduction

Summary

I am very grateful to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College for inviting me to give the Tarner Lectures.

What I want to do in this book, stated boldly and baldly, is to consider the relevance of developments in modern theoretical physics to metaphysical questions about the ultimate nature of reality.

By metaphysical questions I mean the very general sorts of questions that arise out of a critical examination of the principles, concepts and fundamental presuppositions that lie behind modern physics. How should we interpret the claims that physicists seem to be making about the world? Are they intended to be understood as literally true, for example, and exactly what are those claims, given that the pages of theoretical physics monographs are largely filled with abstract mathematical formalism?

In the first chapter, I shall be looking at a range of philosophical points of view in the framework of which such questions can be addressed, and attempt the difficult task of adjudicating between the different approaches. At the end of the day I shall be arguing for a pretty straightforward metaphysical realism, that the external world exists independently of our knowledge of it.

In the second chapter I shall look at arguments from various branches of modern physics that are sometimes claimed to bring in an essential role for subjectivity in physics, bringing the observer into a central role, creating his own reality.