PORTALS TO A NEW REALITY

Quantum physics without limits.

Physics is at a stalemate. Its two best theories—Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics—can’t both be right. Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford, is placing all his bets on the quantum. Our physics woes, he says, come from our failure to see quantum theory as truly universal, governing everything from atoms to people to the universe. For this he blames proponents of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation for placing observers outside the scope of the quantum, granting them a special status to affect what they observe. Despite what you’ve heard, Vedral insists, nothing depends on the observer. “The story I want to tell,” he writes, “is actually more beautiful, engaging, and convincing than the versions we have all heard for too long.” The bulk of the book is concerned with possible (if not plausible) experiments to test the reach of the quantum. Can the gravitational field exhibit quantum entanglement? How about living things? Vedral claims that one experiment has already produced quantum entanglement between tardigrades (adorable micro-animals also known as moss piglets) and the components of a quantum computer. (Others claim it merely produced cold tardigrades.) Erwin Schrödinger famously (and facetiously) described a cat in a superposition of both dead and alive. Vedral wants to put everything in superpositions: bacteria, physicists, clocks, the flow of time itself. Understanding how truly quantum everything is may require new language, new analogies, new mathematics—even then, Vedral says, we may only accept the truth of the quantum when we ourselves can have quantum experiences. How? By redesigning our neurocircuitry to allow for “quantumly augmented perception.” These are wild ideas, which Vedral delivers with enthusiasm, technical know-how, and a few too many exclamation marks (“Heisenberg decided not to quantize time!” “Maybe the whole of mathematics just follows from the laws of physics!”). Average readers will find the details too abstruse. Readers immersed in popular physics may enjoy a new perspective. Is it more beautiful, engaging, and convincing than the rest? That depends on the observer.

An iconoclastic take on the laws that shape reality.