Opinion | Even Physicists Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics - The New York Times - 2 views
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“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
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What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.
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Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics
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There are two problems. One is that quantum mechanics, as it is enshrined in textbooks, seems to require separate rules for how quantum objects behave when we’re not looking at them, and how they behave when they are being observed
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Why are observations special? What counts as an “observation,” anyway? When exactly does it happen? Does it need to be performed by a person? Is consciousness somehow involved in the basic rules of reality?
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The other problem is that we don’t agree on what it is that quantum theory actually describes, even when we’re not performing measurements.
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We describe a quantum object such as an electron in terms of a “wave function,” which collects the superposition of all the possible measurement outcomes into a single mathematical object
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But what is the wave function? Is it a complete and comprehensive representation of the world? Or do we need additional physical quantities to fully capture reality, as Albert Einstein and others suspected? Or does the wave function have no direct connection with reality at all, merely characterizing our personal ignorance about what we will eventually measure in our experiments?
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For years, the leading journal in physics had an explicit policy that papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics were to be rejected out of hand