The Allegory of the Cave

At the beginning of book VII in his work, The republic, Plato wrote a dialogue narrated by Plato's friend Socrates, and Plato's brother, Glaucon. The years Book VII were written fall between 514a and 520a. All this time later, this epitome of existential angst and malaise is as relevant as ever. The idea  that our lives are mere illusions can never be far from the mind of thinking man and his quest to understand his mortal predicament. The famous 1999 movie trilogy by Andy and Larry Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix, picks up the Allegory of the Cave and puts it in a nightmarish future where reality is a cyberspace created by sentient machines, and the character Neo, Played by Keanu Reeves, becomes involved with a rebellion of others like him who have been freed from the illusion of the fabricated dreamworld. The huge success of the movie, and its cult like following is a clear illustration of the persistent power of our concern that what we live is not really all the reality there is. Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical physicist alludes to this in scientific terms in his A Briefer History of Time (2005), an updated version of a Brief History of Time, made more accessible to the general public. It is a marvelously written book, that makes the most baffling theories of modern astrophysics understandable to any one who took physics in high school. The idea behind quantum physics is that the universe is a far different place than the world we see. Niels Bohr said : "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it". The idea that energy is not continuous, but comes in small ,discrete units is strange enough. Add to this that elementary particles behave both like particles and like waves, and that the movement of these particles is inherently random. The ultimate implication of this randomness is that if you want to say that something behaves a certain way, or even EXISTS, you must give the context of this behavior or existence, since in another context it may behave differently, OR NOT EXIST AT ALL. Extrapolated to the human condition, the implications are mind boggling. We may be as much a product of a specific mathematical equation as we are of our own volition. Quantum Physics is an existentialist paradise, or is it? I  wish I could have Plato over for a strong cup of tea, and a thorough heart to heart.