EINSTEIN hated its unpredictability. Niels Bohr shrugged off the philosophical conundrums it posed. Legions of students have wrestled its counter-intuitive nature. Despite all that, quantum mechanics is one of 20th-century science’s towering achievements – extremely successful at explaining the workings of matter. Today it is ingrained in popular culture, and a Google search turns up millions of entries. It has formed the basis of Broadway plays, and even the Dalai Lama has written about it.
In this book of essays, former New Yorker science writer revisits his own encounters with the quantum world, first as a student at…
