“I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table. And whereas all the other talks at the workshop focused on the empirical implications of quantum mechanics, Bassi’s would make a case for what a vast majority of his colleagues consider a highly impl...

Bassi, a 47-year-old theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste, in northeastern Italy, is prominent among a tiny minority of rebels in the discipline who reject this conclusion. “I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table.

“The idea that there is truth and simplicity behind phenomena, if you wish, you can relate it directly to a faith in God that is a unity that gives rise to everything.

It is not necessary that I want to link the two things.”

There is actually “arrogance,” he countered, in the orthod...

“Physics,” Bohr wrote, “is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but as the development of methods for ordering and surveying human experience.”

If all we ask of physics is that it describe human experience, then the paradox goes away.

Of all the weird t...

Schrödinger himself, as disconcerted as anyone by quantum theory’s lack of description, figured that it was simply incomplete — a conclusion his contemporary Albert Einstein shared, pointedly asking one colleague if he truly believed that the moon wasn’t there when no one was looking. But to most...