We see ourselves in the sunlight of science, standing before a dark cave of quantum paradox, but it may be the other way around. In Plato’s allegory, we are sitting in the cave of materialism with our backs to the sunlight, calling the shadows it casts on the wall of space real. If quantum theory is true, then so was Plato, that our reality is but a shadow of what causes it. And the chains that bind aren’t of culture but evolution, so humanity has been entranced by this shadow-show for millions of years.
But if so, can’t we turn from the shadows to see their source? A hundred years of physics says no. Einstein tried, but the quantum brilliance baffled him, so he concluded that nothing was there. Bohr tried too, but in his impenetrable Copenhagen suit, saw only more shadows, so he concluded that it was an illusion. We are built to see shadows it seems, not light.
Given the situation, physicists quarantined the quantum light behind a wall of equations only they could read. This let them use it without looking at it, so the first rule of their quantum club became that it was about nothing at all. The acolytes who followed, to harvest the benefits of quantum reality, had to first deny that it exists, but saying that its own best theory was about nothing led physics nowhere.
Quantum theory makes no more sense now than it did a hundred years ago, and the next century will be the same if we follow the same path, so it’s time to talk about quantum reality. The physicist Wheeler, who understood quantum theory more than most, called it a great smoky dragon (Wheeler, 1983) that is both powerful and mythical but if quantum theory is true, this dragon is real and the world we see is its smoke (Figure 3.27). At best, most see quantum reality as a shadow world that might exist beneath physical reality but in quantum realism, it is the real world whose shadow is the physical world we see.
Table 3.3 compares quantum realism and physical realism for light, but if our universe began as light, how did matter begin? The next chapter addresses this and questions the wall that separates waves from particles.