Beyond Weird
Philip Ball
Vintage Digital
<b>'If you aren’t shocked by quantum mechanics, you haven’t understood it.'</b><br /><br />Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realise that it’s not just telling us that ‘weird’ things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world. It tells us that<i>everything</i>is quantum: our everyday world is simply what quantum becomes at the human scale. But if quantum mechanics is right, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seems obvious or right, or even possible, at all.<br /><br />Over the past decade or so theories and experiments have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and knowledge itself. Yet calling the quantum world ‘weird’ – implying that it’s weird down there but we’re OK up here – won’t do any longer. The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called ‘weird’, it’s us.<br /><br /><i>Beyond Weird</i>offers the first up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to get to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles create the world we experience.