1 - Reality's Magic Trick
Scientists take pride in making the world rational. This helped society emerge from a dark and superstitious past. But it's time for that pride to end. It's preventing many scientists from truly appreciating the absolute magic at the heart of quantum mechanics and therefore of reality itself. Even the simplest demonstration of quantum mechanics - the double-slit experiment [1] - shows the world behaving in impossible ways and should inspire the same type of wonder as if a ghost walked through the wall in front of you. Because that's essentially what's going on with the building blocks of our universe - the quantum world. David Deutsch, a father of quantum computing [2] , gives a simple demonstration: Instead of acknowledging the impossible magic of the quantum world, science traditionally has obfuscated it as "wave-particle duality" - as if that explains anything! It does not. The only interpretation of quantum mechanics that actually explains thi