A Simplified Title for the Target Audience: Quantum Physics: What You Thought You Knew Is Different

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it," Niels Bohr famously remarked many years ago. Since then, quantum mechanics has only become more shocking. We now realize that it's not just "weird" things happening out of sight, in the atomic world – rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don't seem obvious or right at all – or even possible.

Beyond Weird is an exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, offering an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade, it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge – about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments have called into question the very meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself.

As Philip Ball's "gorgeously lucid text" (The Washington Post) demonstrates, the quantum world is not a different world – it is our world. If anything deserves to be called "weird," it's us. Ball's book "weighs up the competing interpretations, and the misconceptions, that have attached themselves to quantum theory in its 100-year history" (Sunday Times), while his "prose is a pleasure to read" (Wall Street Journal).

The quantum realm revealed by this landmark work is not the "weird" domain we might have imagined, hidden from view. Rather, it is the very foundation of the reality we inhabit – a reality that, as Ball shows, is far stranger and more fascinating than the one we think we know. Beyond Weird is a revelatory exploration of the true nature of the quantum world, and its profound implications for us all.

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