Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

realism, or a “realist empiricism.”117

I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every c

But we need to be careful here: we never see a quantum superposition. What we see are consequences of the superposition. These consequences are called “quantum interference.” It is the interference that we see, not the superposition.