Embracing quantum physics could make you see the world differentlyKamilSD / Alamy
In December 2019, a bad tooth almost killed me. A terrible toothache turned into the biggest health crisis of my life, ultimately landing me in an intensive care unit for a week. Once I recovered, I had to make sense of why this happened to me. Personal negligence? Terrible luck? A fault of the US healthcare system? Rattled and unsure of how to feel, I turned to a place where I had long found answers to existential questions – quantum physics.
Physics is often considered to be humanity’s oldest science, getting its start with early astronomers. Much of our understanding of the world is built on physics as a solid, rigorous, objective foundation. It is a science that breaks the world into pieces, analyses each of them, then reassembles them all into a whole that we understand better. This process, based on empiricism and mathematics, doesn’t care about feelings. Physics isn’t personal: for example, regardless of who you are, you cannot escape a black hole. Yet I have always taken physics extremely personally.
In my book, Entangled States: A life according to quantum physics, I invite the reader to do the same and, by showing how this benefited me, argue that making the objective subjective can be life-changing.
