Alternate View Column AV-16 Quantum mechanics is weird. It has led respectable physicists to spin theories about cats that are half alive and half dead, about worlds which split into alternate universes with each quantum event, about a reality altered because an intelligent observer watches it, about mathematical equations describing "knowledge" rather than physical reality. This month's AV is about my own work, a new interpretation of quantum mechanics which seeks to dispell this weirdness by depicting each quantum event as a "transaction", a sort of handshake across space-time. A long description of this "Transactional Interpretation" has just been published in the July Reviews of Modern Physics (available at most university and major public libraries). It challenges the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg which has maintained a shaky dominance as the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics for over fifty years.