Quantum Mechanics is different. Its weirdness is evident without comparison. It is harder to train your mind to have quantum mechanical tuition, because quantum mechanics shatters our own personal, individual conception of reality
The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.
Quantum mechanics, that big, new, spectacular remarkable idea is that you only predict probabilities, the likelihood of one outcome or another. That’s the new idea.
But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.
That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe.
And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that’s been the big challenge and that’s why we have been excited about string theory, as it’s one of the only approaches that can put it together.
