Science & Reality

"If Quantum Mechanics is the simple truth," says Nobel physicist Anthony Leggett, "then it's just a formalism with no corresponding physical reality. People who believe that should reflect on just how weird a place the universe really is."

The weirdness at the bottom of today's fundamental physics stretches the idea of "reality" to the limit, yet its findings are among the best confirmed of any scientific theory. Is physics really a "picture" of a strangely paradoxical "real" world, or just a powerful set of predictive tools? Is the human brain even evolved to grasp the underlying nature of things?

What does it mean, then, to speak of a World whose nature and existence are "objective," or a Science that gives us a true picture of what is? In spite of the achievements of empiricism, one ancient philosophical question won't go away: "What is Reality?"