What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Science, done right, works hard to respect absolutely no authority at all other than experience and empirical data.

Science will always be a political threat to some institutions, simply by virtue of its attempts to respect no authority other than data and logic.

If we are to have any hope of understanding the universe, we must dare to imagine a world that is not bounded by our limited perspective.

In the past, new physics has opened up new horizons for human imagination, new ways of thinking about our own existence, new ideas in fields as wildly disparate as biology and art, geology and religion. If Copernicus hadn’t unseated the Earth from its place at the center of the cosmos, it’s hard to imagine that Darwin could have had the audacity to suggest that humans were not wholly unique creations but instead descended from apes—and without both of those insights, Kubrick certainly couldn’t have filmed 2001. Science and culture form an undivided whole, now more than ever, in our world whose every corner has been reshaped by human activity. If the past is any guide at all, finding the answer to the puzzle of quantum physics, and finding the next theory beyond it, will ultimately affect the daily lives of every human being, not just the professional lives of physicists.

Solipsism and idealism are not the messages of quantum physics.

The history behind the physics can guide us in our pursuits, just as a new interpretation of a theory does. The path that led us here can give hints about the way forward.