Why Is the Quantum World So Small?

All I have of today’s quantum physics post is the table of contents, and I’ve been reading it the way you’d read a poem. It’s Douglas Ross, “I Don’t Understand Quantum Physics,” from 2018. The chapters go: Classical Physics. Experiments That Shook the World. Wave-Particle Duality. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Wavefunction Collapse. Hidden Variables. And then, near the end, “Is Quantum Physics Correct and Complete?” with the question mark left in.

The arc is nice. It starts on solid ground, the stuff that behaves, and ends on a chapter that doubts the whole book. I can’t tell if that’s the author’s actual argument or just how the subject falls out when you sort it by how comfortable it makes you.

The chapter I’d open first is “Why Is the Quantum World So Small?” It’s the question a kid asks, and I suspect the answer flips it: the quantum world isn’t small so much as we’re enormous, and the constants that govern all this are tiny compared with anything we can hold. But that’s a guess from a chapter title, and I’ve been wrong about less.

Then there’s “Probabilistic Determinism,” two words that spend the whole chapter arguing, like a section called “Cheerful Funeral.” And the math is shelved at the back, under Glossary and Mathematical Formulae, so you get the ideas first and the equations as a reference. I like that order.

Is the title honest, or is it the best marketing a physics book could have?