First, witness our own burgeoning ability to create vividly realistic simulations, using computers, making ever more plausible the notion that simulations might someday become so detailed that the entities within it would experience ersatz emotions and memories indistinguishable from the "real thing."

Then there are strange results from science. Physicist Alain Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart, apparently violating standard notions of "causality connection" which are supposed to be limited by the speed of light. University of London physicist David Bohm believes that Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality, from the completely different direction of explaining the power of the human brain.

Struggling to make the quantum rules square with a reality "out there," many physicist's position is "shut up and calculate." Others have abandoned standard logic, probability, or decision theory for "quantum" versions of these things, or have decided that consciousness must play a fundamental role. (There is even a quantum game theory.)

In eleven days I give my first talk at a physics department, on my conservative research program that tries to have it all: the quantum rules, a reality out there with no special role for consciousness, and keeping standard logic, probability, and decision theory. I'm not quite there yet, and I may be too close to my work to be objective, but I feel I'm very close.

Of course we can't make all the quantum strangeness go away. For example, reality seems to be intrinsically non-local, and it seems to be far larger than we ever imagined. But the universe we are all familiar with now is far larger than our ancestors ever imagined, and even Newton gave up on locality.