BOOK REVIEW / Which came first, physics or the egg?: 'The Quantum Society' - Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall: Bloomsbury, 14.99 pounds

HISTORY has seen enough failed attempts to explain society in strictly scientific terms for the enterprise to look unattractive. But Danah Zohar's case - although her husband is credited as co-author, the bulk of the book is hers alone - is that there is nothing wrong with the enterprise in principle; it's just that people have used the wrong kind of science. Get the science right, and the rest will follow.

At the root of The Quantum Society, and of its predecessor, The Quantum Self, is the belief that Western thinking is dominated to an unhealthy extent by classical physics: from Newton's vision of an orderly, predictable universe we have derived a 'mechanistic' world-view. When we try to explain how our brains work we are confined to rigid categories - old-fashioned dualism or modern computer models - and when we talk about society we can't progress beyond the dichotomy of selfish individualism or sheeplike collectivism. Because of this, we have created a society that fails to do justice to the variety of people within it.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, offers a more subtle view of reality, characterised by indeterminacy and ambiguity. Allow this to shape our understanding and we can forge a more open, creative society that will follow a third way, between individualism and collectivism.

It's easy to see why Zohar has fans. Her social vision is sweeping and warm, full of attractive concepts such as value and creativity; her explanation of quantum physics is about as lucid as these things ever get, too. Yet her account of the current state of philosophy, and of its relationship with science, is unfairly reductive. According to Zohar, physics dictates philosophy dictates society - an oddly mechanistic view of things. It's surely arguable that there is interplay between these categories - that the kind of society we live in has an effect on the kind of philosophy and science we practise, as well as vice versa.

But that takes us back to the original question: why bother the physicists - why describe society in scientific terms at all? Zohar's reasoning is that science offers accuracy: 'Through the precise and testable imagery of physics we may learn a new language for describing other, related domains of our more daily experience.' This points to the book's central flaw. Language that is precise in one context becomes metaphorical in another - and hence, inevitably, some imprecision slips in.

In fact, Zohar claims to be offering something far more concrete than a new set of metaphors - she has an entirely new theory of how our brains work, based on quantum mechanics. The outline of this theory, and the later chapter on the evolution of the universe - both sections attributed to Ian Marshall - are the most intriguing parts of the book, if not entirely convincing. If his conjectures are true, it would imply a revolution not only for our understanding of the mind, but also for our understanding of quantum physics, which is a lot of revolutions for a theory supported by almost no hard facts.

The quantum explanation of human consciousness relies mainly on what Zohar calls 'analogical evidence' - not a category most scientists would recognise. Just as photons and other quantum phenomena have a duality - they can be both wave-like and particle-like - so do we: we can be both individuals and part of a community. As described by Zohar, the similarities are noticeable, though not 'uncanny', a word she uses a number of times in this context. But when you talk about waves and particles in a quantum context, you've already resorted to metaphors; so that there are a number of layers of metaphor separating human from quantum behaviour.

Even granting similarities, the reasoning is weak and circular. Sometimes Zohar's case is that we act like quantum systems, so we must be made from them; at other times she is saying that we are quantum systems, so we should learn to act like one.

Still, if the scientific conclusions are controversial, the social conclusions are easier to swallow: we must act as a community, while celebrating our diversity; we must love one another, but not obsessively; we must have values, but we must not cling to them too rigidly. What the authors of this generous, implausible book are after, you realise, is a scientific basis for niceness. If they have really found one, we will all be in their debt. But for the moment, it looks as though we'll have to let science stick to providing a scientific basis for more science, and get on with trying to be nice off our own bats.