We see ourselves in the sunlight of rationality standing before the dark cave of quantum paradox, but as in Plato’s cave analogy, it may be the other way around, that we are sitting in the darkness of physicality with our backs to the quantum sunlight, calling the shadows it casts on the wall of space real. Quantum theory and relativity have loosed the chains that bind, but who will turn and look? Einstein did but the quantum brilliance blinded him. Bohr did but his impenetrable Copenhagen suit revealed only his own reflection. The quantum light is currently quarantined behind a wall of arcane equations and the acolytes that harvest it must first deny that it exists. The first rule of the quantum club is that there is no quantum world, but calling its own best theory a theory of nothing is leading physics nowhere.
Table 3.3 contrasts how quantum realism and physical realism explain light for the reader to decide. Quantum theory today makes no more sense now than it did last century and the next hundred years will be the same unless it becomes a reality description. If the quantum world is a great smoky dragon (Wheeler, 1983), then the physical world is its smoke (Figure 3.27). The quantum world is not a shadow world existing alongside physical reality but the real world whose shadow is the physical world we see.