  Richard Feynman famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics and
cautioned against asking: "But how can it be like that?" Something about the
conceptual foundations of the theory is profoundly puzzling, but just what is
so disturbing is not easy to pin down. Three books by Olival Freire (The
Quantum Dissidents), Adam Becker (What is Real?), and Philip Ball (Beyond
Weird) are about rival attempts to say how it can be like that and, in the case
of the Freire and Becker books, about the hostility between opposing camps,
which sometimes had devastating consequences for the professional careers of
the protagonists. I review the issues raised in the three books, and I discuss
what Bohr could have meant by the statement (attributed to Bohr by Aage
Petersen) that "there is no quantum world," along the lines of a neo-Bohrian,
non-representational interpretation of quantum mechanics. (Originally
published, with minor changes, as a review article "Interpreting the quantum
world: old questions and new answers.")
