The Quantum Quest

Again, I don't know how long this article from Nature will be available freely on the web. So read it while you can. It describes the continuing effort to decipher the fundamental issues surrounding Quantum Mechanics, and the effort to formulate it from some set of axioms.

Over the past decade or so, a small community of these questioners have begun to argue that the only way forward is to demolish the abstract entity and start again. They are a diverse bunch, each with a different idea of how such a 'quantum reconstruction' should proceed. But they share a conviction that physicists have spent the past century looking at quantum theory from the wrong angle, making its shadow odd, spiky and hard to decode. If they could only find the right perspective, they believe, all would become clear, and long-standing mysteries such as the quantum nature of gravity might resolve themselves in some natural, obvious way — perhaps as an aspect of some generalized theory of probability.

Zz.