WHAT IS REAL? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
Adam Becker - WHAT IS REAL? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
Reviewed by James Gleick
Reviewed by James Gleick
Are atoms real? Of
course they are. Everybody believes in atoms, even people who don’t believe in
evolution or climate change. If we didn’t have atoms, how could we have atomic
bombs? But you can’t see an atom directly. And even though atoms were first
conceived and named by ancient Greeks, it was not until the last century that
they achieved the status of actual physical entities — real as apples, real as
the moon.
The first proof of
atoms came from 26-year-old Albert Einstein in 1905, the same year he proposed
his theory of special relativity. Before that, the atom served as an
increasingly useful hypothetical construct. At the same time, Einstein defined
a new entity: a particle of light, the “light quantum,” now called the photon.
Until then, everyone considered light to be a kind of wave. It didn’t bother
Einstein that no one could observe this new thing. “It is the theory which
decides what we can observe,” he said.
Which brings us to
quantum theory. The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and
cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is
Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are
stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world
has brought us modern marvels. But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a
profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are
and what they can do.
“Figuring out what
quantum physics is saying about the world has been hard,” Becker says, and this
understatement motivates his book, a thorough, illuminating exploration of the
most consequential controversy raging in modern science. The debate over the
nature of reality has been growing in intensity for more than a half-century;
it generates conferences and symposiums and enough argumentation to fill entire
journals. Before he died, Richard Feynman, who understood quantum theory as
well as anyone, said, “I still get nervous with it...I cannot define the real
problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s
no real problem.” The problem is not with using the theory — making
calculations, applying it to engineering tasks — but in understanding what it
means. What does it tell us about the world?.. read more:
