We might start from the presumption that “weird shit” is no longer an exception to how things can be, an outlier, perturbation, or aberration. We surely know by now that weird is wired, the new normal, in everything except perhaps dentistry, polyamory, and AI-mashed-up “art”: a comfort in the first two, and a tiresome burden in the third.
This is a review of two books about weirdness. One shows that the “weird” of its title is scientifically explicable and very likely not weird at all, the other that the whole cosmic/ quantic tractatus physico-philosophicus is necessarily weird and dubious. You’d think these were opposed to one another—the one reformist, reducing “wonders” to banality; the other revolutionary, problematizing the “obvious”—but the aim of this review is to show that they are facets of the same search for “truth,” and that in addition to contributing to philosophy, they also have something to...