Welcome To The Entanglement

Head chef robot "Andrew" flips Japanese pancakes during the "Kingdom of Robot" press preview at the Huis Ten Bosch amusement park on July 12 in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan. In the last 400 years or so, since the time of the scientific revolution, we have come to find it natural to suppose that the world is comprehensible. Nature and its laws, operating in things most small as well as in the cosmos as a whole, are understandable. And, yet, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, quoted in Samuel Arbesman's intriguing new book coming out next week, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, has written: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but it is queerer than we can suppose." It isn't just the world of physics that has come to seem so exceedingly strange -- at the level of the quantum and also that of the multiverse -- but consciousness itself.