Gribbin closes Six Impossible Things with a flourish borrowed from Groucho Marx: there is, he says, no sanity clause. After ninety years of effort, the best minds have produced six possible “solaces,” none of them sane by everyday standards. The reader is invited to laugh, shrug, and accept that quantum mechanics simply is this way.
Taken as rhetoric, the move is deft. Taken as diagnosis, it is revealing.
The list as confession
Gribbin’s six options are presented as rivals, but read carefully they form something closer to a catalogue of explanatory failure:
The world does not exist unless you look at it.
Particles are guided by waves they cannot affect.
Everything that can happen does happen, in parallel realities.
Everything has already happened; we only notice slices of it.
Everything influences everything else instantly.
The future influences the past.
What unites these is not their diversity, but their shared departure from ordinary explanatory constraints. Each abandons a different intuition — realism, reciprocity, parsimony, temporality, locality, or causality — in order to keep something else intact.
The list reads less like a menu of interpretations than a record of which commitments have been sacrificed under pressure.
“Nobody understands” as closure
Feynman’s famous remark — that nobody understands quantum mechanics — is offered as final reassurance. The reader is warned not to ask how the world can be like this, lest they disappear “down the drain” of futile inquiry.
This is not an empirical claim. It is a recommendation about where to stop thinking.
What is striking, in the context of the preceding chapters, is that the injunction arrives after an enormous amount of ontological creativity. We are encouraged to accept that understanding has failed only once we have entertained collapsing worlds, proliferating universes, timeless totalities, instantaneous influence, and retrocausation.
The problem, apparently, is not a lack of imagination.
What has been preserved
Across all six solaces, one commitment remains remarkably stable: explanation is assumed to consist in describing what entities exist and how they interact across space and time. When that framework strains, the entities multiply, time bends, or causality reverses — but the explanatory grammar itself is never questioned.
The sanity clause is denied not because the world is unintelligible, but because intelligibility has been narrowly defined.
A different diagnosis
Seen from the perspective developed across this series, the conclusion reads differently. The repeated declaration that “nobody knows how it can be like that” does not mark the limits of knowledge, but the limits of a particular explanatory habit.
Quantum mechanics has proven extraordinarily successful as a theory of potential. The trouble begins only when that theory is treated as a literal inventory of reality unfolding in time. Collapse, branching, nonlocal influence, and retrocausation are all attempts to force instantiation to behave like a process rather than a cut.
Once instantiation is recognised as perspectival — as the actualisation of a phenomenon relative to a configuration — the demand for sanity clauses evaporates. Nothing impossible needs to be believed. Nothing incoherent needs to be embraced. And nothing needs to be declared forever beyond understanding.
The joke, reconsidered
Groucho’s joke works because it trades on the idea that sanity is an optional extra. Gribbin’s conclusion suggests that quantum mechanics forces us to abandon it.
The material examined here suggests something else: that sanity has been misplaced. Not lost, but applied at the wrong level.
What quantum mechanics resists is not understanding, but a particular picture of what understanding must look like.
And that, unlike a mystery, is something we can change.
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