A world with this degree of correlation would be weird indeed (Image: Jon Krause)

Our most successful theory of nature is bewilderingly remote from reality. But fixing that may require a weirder theory still

PHYSICS, its practitioners will proudly tell you, is the most fundamental of sciences. Its theories and laws distil the workings of the real world – of particles and planets, heat and light – into stark, sweeping statements of universal validity. Think Newton’s law of gravity, which describes with equal assurance how an apple falls and Earth orbits the sun, or the laws of thermodynamics that govern how energy flows. These physical laws are generally couched in the language of mathematics, to be sure. But this is merely a convenient shorthand. The mathematical quantities are ciphers, proxies for the tangible objects of the real, physical world and their measurable properties.

That was all true until quantum theory arrived on the scene. Quantum theory is odd, not just because its weird predictions are a source of consternation for physicists and philosophers, but because its mathematical structures bear no obvious connection to the real world, as far as we can see. “We do not have a source for the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics,” says Časlav Brukner of the University of Vienna in Austria. “We do not have a nice physically plausible set of principles from which to derive it.” Quantum physics might be quantum – but as far as we can tell it isn’t physics.

We don’t have a physically plausible set of principles from which to derive quantum theory

Now Brukner and a small band of physicists want to change …