The invention of cell phones, modern space probes, and checkout scanners would all—according to Adam Becker in his book What Is Real?—have been impossible without discoveries in quantum physics made in the early twentieth century.

Quantum physics, he explains, has been hugely successful in the practical world; but to this day, physicists have not come up with a fully satisfying theory about why minuscule particles (and waves) behave as they do.

He notes that the popularity of various theories about quantum physics began to change due to advances, ironically, in cosmology. As it turns out, the largest thing we can study is believed to have been packed into an incredibly small space: at the time of the Big Bang.

Fittingly, the word quantum can do double duty in referencing the great and the tiny. Quantum is a Latin term related to the word quantity, referring to an assessment of how much. The physicist Max Planck took the Latin word and applied it to science, so now a reference to the smallest indivisible part of something is known as a quantum.

Yet look up quantum in a dictionary, and you’ll find definitions that don’t seem so minuscule, such as “spectacular,” “sudden and significant,” “bulk,” and even “large.”

Isn’t it quite the quantum leap to go from subatomic particles to big, spectacular bangs and leaps and such?

Ah, well, quantum physics is full of paradoxes.

Scientists do not work in a vacuum, even—I can’t help punning—physicists who experiment in a vacuum regularly.

It’s easy to imagine hard science as being unmarred by the messiness of the humanities, but scientists are only human. In his book about quantum physics in the twentieth century, What Is Real?, Adam Becker tells a historical saga about how politics, war, personalities, and philosophy has affected the ways in which prominent scientists lived, worked, and thought.

Thus the charismatic Danish physicist Niels Bohr influenced what physicists believed about the quantum world for decades, just by dint of personality and institutional position.

Thus Albert Einstein and many other physicists fled from Europe to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s due to the rise of the Nazis. As a result of World War II and its aftermath, the center of quantum physics shifted from Europe to the U.S. This change in location, culture, and political milieu affected physicists’ work in terms of available jobs, funding opportunities, politics and the blacklisting of communists, and in-vogue philosophies.

Thus a young physicist named Hugh Everett III came up with an extremely original idea—the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics—but devoted most of his life not to theory, but to worldly pursuits more fitting to the times.

Most of all, Becker illuminates how the “Copenhagen interpretation” went virtually unchallenged for decades (though Einstein was a notable dissenter) due to accidents of history and culture. He notes,

“All of science is vulnerable to human biases and to influences from all the other spheres of human endeavor—politics, history, culture, economics, art—that some of those biases spring from.”

It makes one wonder: what are today’s unseen biases, and how are they skewing our modern worldview?

What’s out there? Alien life forms?

Maybe.

The physical embodiment of a whole lot of math?

Definitely.

In Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, physicist Alan Lightman waxes poetic about math: certainly as worthy a poetic topic as love or longing. He describes an epiphany he had years ago. He had been stuck on a physics problem, when suddenly he found the answer—the mathematical solution.

“But this was not only mathematics,” he realizes. “Somewhere in the universe, in another galaxy perhaps, this thing might be happening, according to these equations. How could that be? What had I touched?”

And so the narrative circles around this idea of the interconnectedness of math and aesthetic wonderment. Whereas people used to look at stars and wonder at their permanence, science now allows us to look at stars and wonder not at that—for stars are born and die, just like us—but at the permanence of the mathematical equations that govern them.

How can it be that an equation is more eternal than a star?

The next time you want to impress a lover, don’t say “I’d give you the stars!” Instead, try saying this: “I’d give you the equations!”