Andrew Houck

About 100 years ago, scientists started realizing that the world did things that were unintuitive, counterintuitive.

We formulated a set of rules that could describe that weirdness.

Objects could be more than one thing at the same time, like a cat being both alive and dead.

Observing something seemed to change a system.

And you could form links between particles that were distant across the universe.

Those all were surprising.

And so that led to a lot of creativity about what quantum could mean.

But it's still a set of rules.

And so it's both nothing like what you would expect and also very constrained by a set of rules.

They show up at the smallest of scales.

The reason you don't see them on a day-to-day basis is you don't have senses that can perceive atoms and electrons.

It's just as weird that when you let go of something, it falls to the ground.

Why should gravity exist at all?

You don't question it because you're used to it.

Quantum mechanics is kind of the same way, except scientists only first started observing these phenomena 100 years ago.

There were a number of things that shocked people.

I would say most famously, Einstein objected to this idea of entanglement.

That is, that particles could be linked over distances.

Because relativity says information can't travel faster than the speed of light.

That's still true.