Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

'Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory everformulated. The only problem with it, argues Lee Smolin, is that it iswrong ... a fount of provocative ideas ... lucid, upbeat and, finally,optimistic' Graham Farmelo, Nature

Human beings, says Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble With Physics,have always had a problem with theboundary between reality andfantasy, confusing our representations ofthe world with the worlditself. Nowhere is this more evident than inquantum physics, whichforms the basis for our understanding ofeverything from elementaryparticles to the behaviour of materials.

Whilequantummechanics is currently our best theory of nature at an atomicscale, ithas many puzzling qualities - qualities that preclude realismandtherefore give an incomplete description of nature. Rather than question this version of quantum mechanics, however, whole groups of physicists have embraced it as correct and rejected realism.Subscribingto a kind of magical thinking, they believe that what isreal is farbeyond the world we perceive: indeed, that the 'true' worldis hiddenfrom our perception.

Back in the 1920s Einstein, botha realistand a physicist, believed that it was necessary to go beyondquantummechanics to discover what was missing from a true theory ofthe atoms.This was Einstein's unfinished mission, and it is LeeSmolin's too.

Notonly will this new model of quantum physicsform the basis of solutionsto many of the outstanding problems ofphysics, but, crucially, it is atheory that is realist in nature. At atime when science is underattack, and with it the belief in a realworld in which facts are eithertrue or false, never has the importanceof building science on thecorrect foundations been more urgent.

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