Every student of AP chemistry knows the names of Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Hund, Pauli, and Planck and learns the power of quantum mechanics.  They are told of quantum's necessary peculiarities�leaps, duality, tunneling, uncertainty, and perhaps Schr�dinger's cat in a box�but there it generally stops.  It is possible, in fact, for a physical chemist to survive graduate school without hearing of Bell, Bohm, Everett, Mayer, and the truly quantum weird:  teleportation, supersolids, virtual states, and the sovereign of all weirdness:  entanglement.  Yet interest in quantum weirdness remains alive and well, even in the face of �shut up and calculate.�  Therefore there is value in examining the lives and works of the quixotic contesters of quantum weirdness and their creative theories, too.  Accordingly, in this talk we take a few moments to admire the twentieth-century approaches, such as pilot waves, many worlds, and summing over histories, and look at new takes on the quantum weird, including probability models that say quantum weirdness may not be that weird after all.  But Einstein said the gods don't play dice, and action at a distance is spooky, so other approaches may be needed, too.  In this case the lives of the quantum misfits may still have much to teach us:  There's more than one way to skin a cat and room to think outside Schr�dinger's box.

Unsung heroes of the quantum weird

248th National Meeting (2014)

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