for goodness sake, just humor the idea for a second, just one second, and imagine everything being said is bullshit, all this "beauty" and "weirdness" and complicated mystery is absolutely wrong. Granted quantum mechanics produces predictions and enhances technology, but as a scientist, you know and I know that correct predictions and formulae are derived all the time from incorrect hypotheses or understanding. Do we all, as scientists, and physicists in particular, reach have the courage to communicate and explore our gut feeling that's telling ust: man this is all too bullshitty now... The world, nature and explaining it should be simple. A tangent here: "Don't let these snarky popular scientists tell you otherwise (simplicity and elegance are key and goal), they don't even understand their own science, and beyond prediction can not prove any of it in experiments. Anyway, as hard as these scientists want to put it, and as mysterious and out-of-our-reach as they want to put it, it's not. Quantum mechanics is easy to understand  once you expel from it its stupid inconsistencies (rather than build on them). It's a complete mess. The goal of physics is to make elegant and simple the understanding of the world but unlike elegant or simple, actually opposite to elegant and simple, the writer of "The Elegant Universe" , ha, what an internal joke,  bloats and ruins the minds of young generations of scientists. EVERYTHING you see around you is real and can be explained scientifically and rigorously by another paradigm/thesis. (I like Brian, no disrespect at all)