Philip Ball in Quanta:
None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. This unsatisfying state was a key element of Beyond Weird(opens a new tab), my 2018 book on the meaning of quantum mechanics. It’s no wonder experts are as divided as ever(opens a new tab) about what quantum theory says about reality, a century after the theory was developed.
But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism(opens a new tab), a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful notions. Zurek, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has been working for decades to resolve the question of how the quantum rules that govern the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles switch to those of classical physics — Newton’s laws of motion and so on — that operate at the scales of everyday life.
Zurek’s key idea about how this transition occurs, called decoherence, is fairly well established. But his book brings together for the first time all the elements he has been developing into a grand synthesis.
More here.
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