"One of these articles, written by N. David Mermin, gave me a tremendous shock. Mermin described the results of experiments that had been carried out as recently as 1982 to test something called Bell's theorem using two-photon 'cascade' emission from excited calcium atoms. Put simply, Bell's theorem says that my idea of naive realism is in conflict with the predictions of quantum theory in a way that can be tested in the laboratory in special experiments on pairs of quantum particles. These experiments had been done: quantum theory had been proved right and naive realism wrong! There in a montage was a pictorial history of the debate about reality and the experiments that had been done to test it (reproduced opposite). This work struck me as desperately important to my understanding of physical reality, something that as a scientist I felt I ought to know about. This discovery also made me feel rather embarrassed. Here I was, proud of my scientific qualifications and with almost 10 years' experience in chemical physics research at various prestigious institutions around the world, and I had been going around with a conception of physical reality that was completely wrong! Why hadn't somebody told me about this before?"