Few Understand Why Quantum Physics Feels Impossible — Are You Ready to Join Them?

A 3-step quantum experiment that defies intuition

Quantum physics is weird. That’s what you’re supposed to think, anyway. But, also, it’s over one hundred years old and is the most accurate scientific theory ever created. It provides the basis for all modern technology. Surely, then, someone understands what’s going on, right? …right?

I’ll let you decide for yourself. I’m going to show you the simplest set of experimental facts about quantum physics, which display the problem of its interpretation. Fair warning, though: there will be no answers that will satisfy you here.

If nothing else, quantum physics shows us that Nature is much richer than the world constructed by our senses.

Step 1: light is a wave

If you shine a laser in the following arrangement of mirrors and beam splitters — called a Mach-Zehnder interferometer — here is what will happen.

Because laser light — in fact, all light — is an electromagnetic wave, it can experience constructive and destructive…