When Physics Stops Making Sense

In this lecture, David Albert traces one of the most unsettling developments in the history of science: the moment quantum mechanics forced leading physicists to abandon the goal of telling an intelligible story about physical reality. Beginning with Niels Bohr's insistence that no coherent picture can be drawn of what happens between measurements, Albert walks through the key experiments that reveal why. He shows how the uncertainty relation is not merely a gap in our knowledge but a deeper fact about the world, that asking about an electron's hardness when it is known to be white is like asking about the marital status of the number five. Albert then introduces the two core rules of quantum mechanics, explaining how their combination produces the most successful predictive algorithm in history while remaining, in his words, "clearly madness." The lecture makes vivid the intellectual stakes of a science that works perfectly yet resists understanding.