Quantum Foundations

Before the quantum revolution in physics destroyed common-sense notions about the behavior of nature, physicists from Newton to Einstein described a universe that achieved harmony by obeying physical principles of cause and effect:

“I have no better expression than the term ‘religious’ for this trust in the rational character of reality and in its being accessible, at least to some extent, to human reason”, Einstein said.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, physicists were able to prove that particles at the subatomic level did not obey rules of cause and effect, that we can know only the probable location and velocity of a particle, and that the particle’s location and velocity become real only when it is observed. Physicists make a mathematically convincing case that at the moment of the creation of the universe via the Big Bang, none of the laws of physics existed and that there was no cause for the creation of the universe.

As if these challenges to a conventional...