What is Real? A tale of how big egos hijacked quantum physics
The quantum story is all brilliant insights, flawed male scientists – and few female ones. To progress, we may need to dump our prejudices, says a new book
SPOILER alert: we have no answer for the question “what is real?” We can’t describe matter in terms of a wave or a particle; it is both and neither. We are stuck in the place that Erwin Schrödinger described in 1926: “It would depend on the taste of the observer which he now wishes to regard as real… There is certainly no criterion for reality if one does not want to say.”
Nor do we have a good handle on why quantum things such as atoms …