This is no clockwork universe

                       Peter Shor

If the eternal dance of molecules
Is too entangled for us mortal fools
To follow, on what grounds should we complain?
Who promised us that Nature’s arcane rules
Would make sense to a merely human brain?

This is a poem I wrote in frustration, in response to those people who think there must be
some simple, intuitive, reality underlying quantum mechanics that will make it all easily
understandable. Maybe there is, but I don't see any evidence for this, and I think it is quite
unlikely. I posted it to Twitter, and it ended up being chosen for the Quote of the Day in
the Nature briefing on the journal Nature's website.

Nature's comment on this poem, which succinctly summarizes my longer introduction on Twitter, was:

Applied mathematician Peter Shor responds to physicist Sean Carroll’s assertion
in The New York Times that physicists “seem to be O.K. with not understanding
the most important theory they have” — quantum mechanics.