Inquiry: Marcus Chown: THE MATCHBOX THAT ATE A FORTY TON TRUCK PART 2

It’s night, and as you sit staring through a window at the lights of your town or city, you realize you can also simultaneously see a reflection of yourself in the windowpane. A common enough experience, but to understand why we can see both through glass and our reflection is to understand some of the most complex, puzzling and counter-intuitive concepts of Quantum Theory.  That a photon acts both, and neither, like a wave and a particle. That the photon is deeply random and utterly unpredictable.  But though the universe is fundamentally unpredictable, this unpredictability is predictable! If this sounds wild, it’s only the beginning of our discussion tonight with writer and cosmologist MARCUS CHOWN who returns to Inquiry to lead us down the quantum rabbit hole and continue his discussion about his mind blowing book THE MATCHBOX THAT ATE A FORTY TON TRUCK: WHAT EVERY DAY THINGS TELL US ABOUT THE UNIVERSE.