WHAT if you constantly change the ingredients in your raw batter, but the baked cake is always lemon? It sounds like something from a surrealist film, but equivalent scenarios seem to play out all the time in the mathematics of the quantum world.

Nobel prizewinner Frank Wilczek and colleague Alfred Shapere say we can’t ignore the absurdity of the situation any longer. It’s time to get to the bottom of what is really going on, and in the process cement our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

They are part of a broader call to arms against those who are content to use the maths behind quantum mechanics without having physical explanations for their more baffling results, a school of thought often dubbed ‘shut up and calculate’.

‘I don’t see why we should take quantum mechanics as sacrosanct,’ says Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford. ‘I think there’s going to be something else which replaces it.’

Einstein’s widely accepted theory of special relativity states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But the phenomenon of quantum entanglement seems to flout that speed limit by allowing a measurement of one particle to instantaneously change another, even when the two […]