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By Root 2093 0

the side of her glass and drop down to the bar. They grab the glass and see that it is fully intact; somehow the ice cube went right through the solid glass without causing any damage. "Must be post-space-walk hallucinations," says George. They each fight off the frenzy of careening ice cubes to down their drinks in one go, and head home to recover. Little do George and Gracie realize that in their haste to leave, they mistook a decorative door painted on a wall of the bar for the real thing. The patrons of the H-Bar, though, are well accustomed to people passing through walls and hardly take note of George and Gracie's abrupt departure.

A century ago, while Conrad and Freud were illuminating the heart and the soul of darkness, the German physicist Max Planck shed the first ray of light on quantum mechanics, a conceptual framework that proclaims, among other things, that the H-Bar experiences of George and Gracie—when scaled down to the microscopic realm—need not be attributed to clouded faculties. Such unfamiliar and bizarre happenings are typical of how our universe, on extremely small scales, actually behaves.

The Quantum Framework

Quantum mechanics is a conceptual framework for understanding the microscopic properties of the universe. And just as special relativity and general relativity require dramatic changes in our worldview when things are moving very quickly or when they are very massive, quantum mechanics reveals that the universe has equally if not more startling properties when examined on atomic and subatomic distance scales. In 1965, Richard Feynman, one of the greatest practitioners of quantum mechanics, wrote,

There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in one way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.1

Although Feynman expressed this view more than three decades ago, it applies equally well today. What he meant is that although the special and general theories of relativity require a drastic revision of previous ways of seeing the world, when one fully accepts the basic principles underlying them, the new and unfamiliar implications for space and time follow directly from careful logical reasoning. If you ponder the descriptions of Einstein's work in the preceding two chapters with adequate intensity, you will—if even for just a moment—recognize the inevitability of the conclusions we have drawn. Quantum mechanics is different. By 1928 or so, many of the mathematical formulas and rules of quantum mechanics had been put in place and, ever since, it has been used to make the most precise and successful numerical predictions in the history of science. But in a real sense those who use quantum mechanics find themselves following rules and formulas laid down by the "founding fathers" of the theory—calculational procedures that are straightforward to carry out—without really understanding why the procedures work or what they really mean. Unlike relativity, few if any people ever grasp quantum mechanics at a "soulful" level.

What are we to make of this? Does it mean that on a microscopic level the universe operates in ways so obscure and unfamiliar that the human mind, evolved over eons to cope with phenomena on familiar everyday scales, is unable to fully grasp "what really goes on"? Or, might it be that through historical accident physicists have constructed an extremely awkward formulation of quantum mechanics that, although quantitatively successful, obfuscates the true nature of reality? No one knows. Maybe some time in the future some clever person will see clear to a new formulation that will fully reveal the "whys" and the "whats" of quantum mechanics. And then again, maybe not. The only thing we know with certainty