Are we ready for the universe to start making sense?

Since the dawn of quantum mechanics, scientists have insisted that what happens at the smallest scales of reality is impossible to describe. 'When it comes to atoms,' Niels Bohr once wrote, 'language can only be used as in poetry.' Adam Forrest Kay disagrees. Escape from Shadow Physics is his fiery rebuke to Bohr's mentality and his theory, arguing that legendarily mind-bending quantum phenomena have explanations that are as intuitive and natural as any other part of science.

Thanks to Kay's cutting-edge work at MIT, a genuine understanding of the quantum world seems just around the corner. Through bouncing droplets of oil, his team has observed quantum mechanical behaviour emerging on a macroscopic scale - a startling result which suggests that quantum and classical physics are not as irreconcilable as we have been led to think.

What if the original doubters of our quantum orthodoxy (not least Einstein himself) were onto something? In that case, our whole story of twentieth-century physics is inverted, heroes and villains trading places, and we must give up the learned helplessness of thinking that reality is simply too weird to grasp. Weird it may still be, but true understanding seems within our reach once again.