I got my book yesterday. Six Impossible Things. It’s less than 100 pages but I think it’s going to open up the world of quantum mechanics for me, or at least give me something to think about that’s bigger than myself. It feels like it will, and that’s promising. I love reading a book and having to stop every five or six pages to ingest mentally what was said and try to fit it into my paradigm of the world and being excited to do it.

As I read about particles and waves and entanglement and spooky interactions, I find myself wanting to know more about photons and electrons and what they do. Of course, I’m not good at the math of it but it seems as though the language of words ought to suffice, but I think that’s the trick of it all. There are no easy words to describe what people are seeing in the sub-atomic world. They can do the math but something’s missing in the language to describe what they’re seeing.

Most of the people mentioned in this book did a lot of the heavy mental lifting in the 1920’s, which is nearly a century back. So, I’m not plowing new ground, I’m just trying to see if I can understand what they’ve been up to, and now that I think about it, I should probably sort through my Scientific American reprints from my college days to see what they have to say on the subject of sub-atomic particles. Of course, there’s every chance I’ll come out of this more confused than ever but that’s the chance you take when you decide to learn something, even if I’m hard pressed to say how it will help me in my everyday life.