There is likely a tendency for scientifically literate laymen, such as myself, to think of quantum effects in terms of the forces and particles of interaction, of potential, rather than in terms of what some might label `brute matter’. Miracles of scientific measurement and experimentation are almost to be expected nowadays and, lo and behold, we learn in Viewpoint: Matter Waves and Quantum Correlations:
[R]esearchers now have efficient tools in their hands to probe light fields for quantum signatures. Remarkably, these correlations have now been measured for matter waves too.
In other words, scientists now have reliable ways of showing that the seemingly inert stuff of rocks and flesh has wave-like, quantum properties. To be sure, this quantum nature of even rock-like substances shows up in the distributions of radioactive decay (think half-life) for all sorts of dense, heavy matter, but this expansion of experimental measurement emphasizes that matter is not what we naively think it to be, not what even so sophisticiated thinkers as Newton and Boyle thought it to be, no, not even what more recent thinkers such as the Curies or Bohr thought it to be.
Most importantly, it emphasizes that matter also participates in a world of relations and of those metaphysical and concrete processes which are acts-of-being. In philosophical terms, the world is relationist and existentialist and not essentialist. Matter is being reshaped as it interacts with other bits of matter, with the universe as a whole, and with itself.
See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for an early discussion of this issue.