Twenty years ago Paul Buckley and F. David Peat asked several physicists, biologists, and chemists who had been involved in some of the most exciting discoveries in modern scientific thought to participate in the interviews that formed the heart of the book A Question of Physics: Conversations in Physics and Biology. Glimpsing Reality is an expanded version of that book.

The conversations — with Bohm, Pattee, Penrose, Rosen, Rosenfeld, Somorjai, Weizsacker, Wheeler, and Nobel prize winners Heisenberg and Dirac, co-founders of quantum theory, and Prigogine — explore issues which have shaped modern physics and ones which hint at what may form the next scientific revolution. The discussions range over a set of basic problems in physical theory and their possible solutions — the understanding of space, time, and cosmology, the genesis of quantum theory and criticism of the standard interpretations of it, quantum and relativity theories and attempts to unite them — and the conceptual links between physics and biology. The approach is nontechnical, with an emphasis on the basic assumptions of modern science and their implications for understanding the world we live in.

All of the original interviews have been preserved. An introduction has been added to expand the thematic content of the mini-introductions preceding each interview. A new conversation (between the editors) has been added, a dialogue that places the fundamental ideas of quantum theory in a broad perspective to include work on chaos theory and superstring theory. Also new to this volume are two original essays that further develop the main thrust of the text — an exploration of the boundaries between physics and biology with the supervening idea being quantum theory and problems of its interpretation.