The wings of a butterfly shimmer spectacularly in the sun. But when you pulverize these wings – please use only animals that have died of natural causes – the resulting powder is greyish-brown, not vividly coloured. That's quantum mechanics in action: the colour is not due to pigment, but it is due to the fact that light is made of particles that behave like waves.

Plants do not grow in the dark, even if you keep them warm. That's quantum mechanics in action: heat radiation, even if there is lots of it, cannot trigger the proper chemical reactions in leaves, because an individual particle of that radiation doesn't carry enough energy.

When you look out into the street through a window of an evening, you will see yourself reflected in the window, and yet the passers-by can see you, too. That's quantum mechanics in action: the same causes, apparently, do not always have the same effect.

Clearly, you do not need an expensive laboratory or a huge accelerator to see quantum effects. A healthy dose of curiosity will do very well; I think that it will in fact do much better, at a fraction of the price and at a billion times the enjoyment.