The more we learn the more we realize that we don’t have a clue.

“Science is all about ignorance” and since the desire to learn is spurned on by that fact, I find it hard to be resentful and instead am often greatly inspired!

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.

Gone was any certain correspondence between mathematical variables and physical properties. In their place were abstruse objects such as wave functions, state vectors and matrices, all acting in an unreal mathematical environment called Hilbert space - a higher-dimensional, complex version of normal three-dimensional space.

Bizarrely, though, these abstractions work. Follow a set of mathematical rules laid down by the founders of quantum theory and you can make physical predictions that are confirmed time and time again by experiment. Particles that pop up out of nothingness only to disappear again, objects whose physical states can become “entangled” and can influence each other instantaneously over vast distances, cats that remain suspended between life and death as long as we don’t look at them: all of these flow from the mathematical formulation of quantum theory, and all seem to be true reflections of how the world works.

Does it matter that we don’t know why? Surrounded by lasers, microchips and other trappings of quantum technology, we might be tempted to say if the theory ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That is true up to a point, says Martin Plenio of the University of Ulm in Germany. “Quantum mechanics is, in our range of experience, a correct theory. It is sort of fine and we don’t know what is better.” But there are niggles that make him and others itch for something new. One is the great unfinished business of unifying quantum theory with general relativity, Einstein’s resolutely classical theory of gravity.

But question is, will we ever get a unifying theory?

Given all we know we DON’T know, I honestly doubt it…

Then again, the fun IS in the trying isn’t it?