Science

Science is my weakest subject. Then quantum physics caught my attention and I couldn't make head nor tail of it, so I kept digging. What I found is so mind-blowing it ties into everything else in this book. Things in two places at once. Reality that responds to being looked at. And the same old pattern of who gets the credit and who gets crushed. 

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Science I'll be honest, this is my weakest subject by a distance. I was interested in biology at school but only because the teacher was ace. She was always up for a laugh, made it feel like you were learning something without realizing you were learning it, and I genuinely looked forward to her lessons. If every teacher had been like her, I'd probably have paid a lot more attention to a lot more subjects, but physics, chemistry, the hard sciences, they went over my head and I didn't care enough at the time to do anything about it. Over the last year though, quantum physics caught my attention, purely because I couldn't make head nor tail of what was being said. And I'm a little bit like a rag to a bull these days. If I don't understand something, I'll keep digging until I do. This one though, this one is so mind-blowing that it ties in with much more than you might first think. But before we get to the weird stuff, it's worth asking a simple question about science in general. Has it actually made our lives better? Three hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in Britain was about 35. Childbirth killed roughly one in 100 mothers. A cut on your hand could kill you because nobody understood that invisible organisms called bacteria cause disease. Once scientists figured that out, everything changed. Antibiotics could kill the bacteria. Vaccines, tiny doses of a weakened virus that train your immune system to recognize and fight the real thing, wiped out diseases that had terrorized humanity for centuries. Anesthesia meant surgery was no longer a matter of biting down on a stick and hoping you didn't die from shock. Clean water and sanitation, the simple act of separating what we drink from what we flush, saved more lives than almost any other intervention in history. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railways, electricity, telecommunications, flight computing, the internet. In 200 years we went from horse-drawn carts to landing on the moon. We can see inside a living human body without cutting it open using MRI scanners, machines that use magnetic fields to create detailed images of your organs and bones. We carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA had in 1969. By any measurable standard, science has given us extraordinary capabilities. But with all of that, are we actually happier? Are we healthier in the ways that matter? Are we more connected to each other or less? Because the same science that gave us antibiotics gave us biological weapons. The same science that split the atom, breaking apart the tiny particles that make up all matter to release enormous energy, used that energy to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing roughly 200,000 people in two days. The same science that built the internet built the surveillance systems that monitor everything you do on it. The same science that developed modern agriculture feeds billions with food so processed and sprayed that rates of cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disease are higher than at any point in human history. Science itself isn't the problem. Science is a method. You observe something, you come up with an explanation, you test it, you learn from the results. It's the most honest system humans have ever devised for understanding the world. The problem, as with everything else in this book, is what the institutions do with it. Gunpowder was invented in China for fireworks and became the foundation of modern warfare. Nuclear fission was theoretically beautiful and became the most destructive weapon ever created. The internet was designed by academics to share research and became the most sophisticated advertising and surveillance machine in existence. The discovery is pure, the application is corrupted by whoever controls it. And the people who made the discoveries? Galileo proved the Earth orbits the Sun and was placed under house arrest by the Catholic Church for the rest of his life. Ignaz Semmelweiss figured out in the 1840s that doctors were killing patients by not washing their hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies, and his colleagues rejected him so aggressively he had a breakdown and died in an asylum at 47. Alan Turing cracked the Enigma Code, the encryption system the Nazis used to communicate secretly, shortened the war by an estimated two years, laid the foundations of modern computing, and was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated, and died at 41. The institution captures the discovery and punishes the discoverer if they threaten the existing order. Same pattern, different century. Now for the weird stuff. Everything you can see and touch is made of atoms, the smallest unit of any element. If you could zoom into a glass of water far beyond what any microscope can see, you'd eventually reach individual atoms. Atoms are made of even smaller parts, protons and neutrons clustered together in the center, and electrons orbiting around the outside. For a long time, scientists thought these behaved like tiny solid balls, moving in predictable paths. Then, in the early 1900s, physicists started looking closer and found that at this incredibly small scale, the rules we take for granted simply stop working. In the world you and I live in, a thing is either here or there. A ball is in your left hand or your right hand, not both. At the quantum level, a particle can exist in multiple states at the same time. A condition called superposition. Think of a coin spinning in the air. It's neither heads nor tails until it lands. A quantum particle is like that, except it isn't just that we don't know which state it's in. It genuinely hasn't settled into one yet. It only becomes definite when someone observes it. The act of looking at it determines what it becomes. Then there's entanglement. When two particles interact in a certain way, they become linked, not by a wire or a signal or any physical connection, linked in a way that has no explanation in the physics of our everyday world. You can separate them by any distance, put one on Earth and one on the other side of the galaxy, and when you measure one, the other responds instantly, not at the speed of light, which at roughly 186,000 miles per second is supposed to be the fastest anything can travel. Instantly, no delay, regardless of distance. Einstein called it spooky action at a distance because he was convinced it must be wrong. It isn't. In 2022, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for proving it conclusively. In 2024, researchers achieved quantum teleportation, the transfer of quantum data from one location to another, without it physically travelling between the two over ordinary internet cables. In 2025, a team at Stanford built a device that entangles light and electrons at room temperature, something previously only possible near absolute zero, roughly minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest anything can theoretically get. Nobody fully understands why it works. It breaks the idea that information needs time to travel and suggests that at the deepest level things that appear separate might not be. Then there's the double slit experiment. You fire electrons one at a time at a barrier with two narrow slits in it. Behind the barrier is a screen that records where each one lands. If electrons were tiny balls, you'd expect two clusters of hits behind the two gaps, like lobbing tennis balls through a fence. Instead, they create an interference pattern, a series of bands spread across the screen that only makes sense if each electron is behaving like a wave, passing through both slits simultaneously and overlapping with itself on the other side. One particle, two gaps at the same time. Now put a detector at the slits to watch which gap the electron goes through. The interference pattern vanishes. It behaves like a ball again, picking one slit. Remove the detector and the wave pattern returns. The electron behaves differently, depending on whether anyone is watching. There are interpretations. The Copenhagen interpretation, developed by the physicist Niels Bohr, says the mathematical description of all the particles' possible states collapses into a single state when observed. The many worlds interpretation says every possibility branches into a separate universe, but no one actually knows. The most successful theory in the history of science, the one that makes your phone and your microwave and your MRI scanner work, and its own creators couldn't explain what it means. Quantum computing is built on these principles. A normal computer processes information in bits, each one either a zero or a one, like a switch that's on or off. Everything it does is built from long strings of zeros and ones calculated one at a time. A quantum computer uses qubits, quantum bits, and because of superposition, a qubit can be zero, one, or both simultaneously. This means it can process enormous numbers of calculations at the same time rather than in sequence. In 2019, Google demonstrated that its quantum processor solved a specific problem in 200 seconds that would take the world's best classical supercomputer roughly 10,000 years. The implications go far beyond speed. Encryption, the system that protects your bank details, your medical records, military communications, government secrets, all of it, is built on mathematical problems that classical computers can't solve in any reasonable time frame. That's what keeps it secure. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could crack those problems. A Google researcher published a study suggesting that RSA 2048, one of the most widely used encryption standards, could be broken in under a week with a quantum machine of fewer than a million qubits. Current machines have dozens to hundreds, but the race is on and every major government and tech company on Earth is trying to get there first. In 2025, which UNESCO declared the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Clark, Michel Devere, and John Martinis for proving that quantum effects like tunnelling, where a particle passes through a barrier it shouldn't be able to get through, like a ball rolling straight through a solid wall, can occur at scales visible to the human eye, not just at the subatomic level. That blurred the line between the quantum world and the one we think we live in. Stanford researchers built miniature light traps that could eventually scale quantum computers to a million qubits. Microsoft announced a breakthrough in Majorana qubits, a type that stores information in a way that resists the interference which has been quantum computing's biggest obstacle, because qubits are incredibly fragile and lose their state at the slightest disturbance. A new state of matter called a quantum liquid crystal was discovered at the boundary between two exotic materials, behaving unlike anything observed before, and physicists found hidden geometry inside materials that bends electrons the way gravity bends light in space. I don't pretend to understand all of this, but I understand enough to know that the most rigorous, evidence-based, peer-reviewed discipline humans have ever created has spent a century studying the smallest components of reality and arrived at conclusions that sound, to a non-scientist, completely insane. Things exist in two states at once until someone looks at them. Particles separated by any distance remain instantly connected. The solid world we think we're living in is, at its foundation, a cloud of probabilities that only becomes definite when someone pays attention. I don't know what that means. The physicists don't either, and the honest ones will tell you so. But if reality at its most fundamental level is not what we were told it is, then what else have we been wrong about? That question has been running through every chapter of this book, and we're about to find out that science isn't the only place it leads.