ABSTRACT
Isaac Newton, Pierre Laplace and the vast majority of the great scientists of the classical era regarded time as an absolute quantity flowing in some determined way like a great river guided by the solid banks of reality. Einstein shows his special theory of relativity that in fact time is not absolute; there are many rivers of time, each flowing at its own speed. Einstein described Schrodinger’s cat paradox as the ‘prettiest way’ of illustrating his belief that quantum theory, although it is a fantastically successful tool, is not a complete description of reality. The scientific stars were out to laud Schrodinger because, early in 1926, he published an extraordinary equation that codified much of the ghostly behaviour of the microworld. A key fact of quantum life was thus known, but far from understood: in some circumstances, light is best regarded as a wave, whereas in other situations light is far more usefully treated as a shower of minute particles.
