Author of over three hundred research papers on the mathematical, physical, and philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics, CPNS Fellow Henry Stapp has spent his entire career working in frontier areas of theoretical physics. After completing his thesis work under Nobel Laureates Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, Stapp worked personally with Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and John Wheeler on the mathematical foundations of quantum theory. His deep interest in the quantum measurement problem led him to pursue extensive work pertaining to a quantum mechanical description of physical processes occurring in our brains. The understandings achieved in this work have been described in many technical articles and now, in more accessible prose in the present book, Mindful Universe (Springer Verlag 2007).

The classical mechanistic idea of nature that prevailed in science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an essentially mindless conception: the physically described aspects of nature were asserted to be completely determined by prior physically described aspects alone, with our conscious experiences entering only passively. During the twentieth century the classical concepts were found to be inadequate. In the new theory, quantum mechanics, our conscious experiences enter into the dynamics in specified ways not fixed by the physically described aspects alone. Consequences of this radical change in our understanding of the connection between mind and brain are described.

untenable myth. He elaborates on ideas of Bohr, von Neumann, Heisenberg and, from a philosophical point of view, James and Whitehead to sketch a complex picture in which the physical and the mental are emphatically conditioned by each other. Stapp's wide-ranging proposal offers stimulating reading, a strong sense of conceptual coherence and intuitive appeal, and empirical predictions that deserve to be refined and tested."