In the Preface to this book, we started with Alice and Bob having very different views of their observations. Alice used an optical telescope and reported nothing unusual about a distant galaxy that she could see. Bob, on the other hand, detected intense radio activity in that galaxy. Our question was: who has the true view of that galaxy?

We advised the reader that the answer is not Alice. Neither is it Bob. The answer is not both of them, nor is it neither of them. It is not a trick question either. So what is the answer that this book would supply?

Our answer will come presently.

While this book has set forth a definite mathematical perspective on empirical physics, it has contained quite a lot of commentary that might be disparaged as metaphysics or philosophy. Such commentary is generally frowned on in science, because it has no empirical content. It is vacuous.

In our defense, we point out the obvious: science is not a robotic activity; it is carried out by humans and these are driven by their metaphysical, philosophical, and emotional imperatives. For instance, the hard-core scientific view that quantum theory needs no interpretation but only application is itself a philosophy. It is no more than a conditioned response, based on opinion and subscription to current scientific norms. It is, indeed, a philosophy of how to do quantum mechanics. So we all do it, in one way or another. Our concern in this book is that the way that we do it should be based soundly on scientific principles. The quantized detector approach that we describe and use in this book is our attempt to do just that.

There is an excellent paper on all of this that has the provocative title “Quantum Theory Needs No Interpretation,” by Fuchs and Peres (2000). It seems on the face of it to dismiss any sort of “interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In fact, close reading of it confirms (to us at least) the agenda that we have set out in this book. Yes, quantum mechanics needs no interpretation, when it is being applied to processes that take place in the information void.