“If I could tell you in two sentences,” said Richard Feynman, “I wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.” It was October 1965 and a reporter had asked him to explain in potted form what he had done to deserve the accolade. Feynman was being rewarded for his part in developing quantum electrodynamics, a theory that deals with the interactions of light and matter. Yet later, this celebrated physicist admitted: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” He went on to caution: “Do not keep asking yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
As the science journalist and writer Philip Ball explains in Beyond Weird, what troubled Feynman was the sort of reality the theory seemed to be describing. No one has ever disputed the correctness of the equations of quantum mechanics, just how to interpret them. It was this that Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr debated on and off for the best part of 30 years: what does quantum mechanics actually mean? It was Bohr’s position, later called the Copenhagen interpretation, which so bothered Feynman even though it was and remains popular among those who don’t ask, “How can it be like that?”
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