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What Fiction are you reading this week, November 2, 2025?
In Rio de Janeiro, the seventh largest national library in the world.
I'm reading My Friends by Fredrick Backman. ".. an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger's life twenty-five years later." Wow, amazing writing.
Listening to The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart. "Fifth century Britain is a country of chaos and division after the Roman withdrawal. Born the bastard son of a Welsh princess who will not reveal to her son his father's true identity, Merlin leads a perilous childhood, haunted by portents and visions. But destiny has great plans for this no-man's-son."
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Good for you! Stocking up for winter is always a good plan. AND helping others. 
.
But since you mentioned it, as it so happens, I recently purchased a book on Quantum Physics by a scientist Adam Becker called “What is Real?”
I am eagerly looking forward to it:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/grand-delusion/
Waves are certainly visualizable, but the world we live in, the world of laboratory experiments, does not present itself as made of waves. It presents itself, if anything, as made of particles. How do we get from waves to recognizable everyday stuff?
This, in a nutshell, is the central conundrum of quantum mechanics: how does the mathematical formalism used to represent a quantum system make contact with the world as given in experience? This is commonly called the measurement problem, although the name is misleading. It might better be called the where-in-the-theory-is-the-world-we-live-in problem.
For Bohr and Heisenberg, the measurement problem is how the unvisualizable can influence the observable (and hence visualizable). For Schrödinger it is how waves can constitute solid objects such as cats. In wave mechanics, the little planetary electron of the old quantum theory gets smeared out into a cloud surrounding the nucleus. If quantum mechanics provides a complete description of the electron—as Bohr insisted—this diffuseness is not merely a reflection of our ignorance about where the electron is, it is a characteristic of the electron itself. As Schrödinger memorably wrote to Albert Einstein, “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” This unexpected (but perfectly visualizable) mistiness of the electron was fine by Schrödinger: after all, we have no direct experience of electrons to contradict it. But the dynamics of the theory could not confine the smeariness to microscopic scale. In certain experimental situations, the haziness of the electron would get amplified up to everyday scales. The electron that is nowhere-in-particular gives birth to a cat that is no-state-of-health-in-particular. Schrödinger found this result manifestly absurd: something must have gone wrong somewhere in the physics.
For his part, Bohr insisted—as he had to—that the description of an experimental procedure and its outcome be classical, which is to say visualizable. Otherwise, you could not tell what experiment was done and how it came out. But at some point, if we are probing the microscopic realm, we must reach the unvisualizable. And the interaction between the two must itself be unvisualizable, since one part is. So all one can ask for is a mathematical rule: if an interaction occurs, what are the probabilities of the various possible classical outcomes? There is no more to be sought from quantum theory than these numbers. And matrix mechanics typically does not provide a precise prediction but a set of probabilities for different outcomes. The deterministic world of classical physics has been lost.
This, in a nutshell, is the central conundrum of quantum mechanics: how does the mathematical formalism used to represent a quantum system make contact with the world as given in experience? This is commonly called the measurement problem, although the name is misleading. It might better be called the where-in-the-theory-is-the-world-we-live-in problem.
For Bohr and Heisenberg, the measurement problem is how the unvisualizable can influence the observable (and hence visualizable). For Schrödinger it is how waves can constitute solid objects such as cats. In wave mechanics, the little planetary electron of the old quantum theory gets smeared out into a cloud surrounding the nucleus. If quantum mechanics provides a complete description of the electron—as Bohr insisted—this diffuseness is not merely a reflection of our ignorance about where the electron is, it is a characteristic of the electron itself. As Schrödinger memorably wrote to Albert Einstein, “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” This unexpected (but perfectly visualizable) mistiness of the electron was fine by Schrödinger: after all, we have no direct experience of electrons to contradict it. But the dynamics of the theory could not confine the smeariness to microscopic scale. In certain experimental situations, the haziness of the electron would get amplified up to everyday scales. The electron that is nowhere-in-particular gives birth to a cat that is no-state-of-health-in-particular. Schrödinger found this result manifestly absurd: something must have gone wrong somewhere in the physics.
For his part, Bohr insisted—as he had to—that the description of an experimental procedure and its outcome be classical, which is to say visualizable. Otherwise, you could not tell what experiment was done and how it came out. But at some point, if we are probing the microscopic realm, we must reach the unvisualizable. And the interaction between the two must itself be unvisualizable, since one part is. So all one can ask for is a mathematical rule: if an interaction occurs, what are the probabilities of the various possible classical outcomes? There is no more to be sought from quantum theory than these numbers. And matrix mechanics typically does not provide a precise prediction but a set of probabilities for different outcomes. The deterministic world of classical physics has been lost.
Makes my head hurt always..the smeariness unfortunately also appears to apply to how such information is stored or encoded in my head.
Georgette Heyer, P G Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Anthony Trollope (well just Barchester Towers really), Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, Herman Wouk and Agatha Christie are my go to sources for self-indulgence. I very much enjoy Orwell for all that he doesn’t specialise in fluffy comedies of manners. I like what little I have read of George Gissing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nether_World
Dickens, Hardy and Thackeray are slightly more taxing.
"Saving Agnes."
Cusk has written over a dozen books. Her latest, Parade, is an award-winning, "startling, exhilarating novel that once again expands the notion of what fiction can be and do."
Published in June of this year. Author Otto Ernst says, on Amazon, "It was a special day for me when I received notification that 'Eleven Days of Wonder' had been published. Originally, the story had a different title and was supposed to describe a struggle to prevent a corporate takeover. The reader may still detect remnants of this early false start. However, the struggles one deals with at an age of ninety are enough to yearn for an easier life. That's why the fictional characters in this book allowed me to tell a story that could be true but may at times seem to be more like a fairy tale."
Neither the book nor the author show up on the FictionDataBase. 
Thanks for sharing, though. Someone else may want to find and read it.
