j***@gmail.com
2018-01-22 08:26:14 UTC
"The Rubard Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", 2009
Short thought: we all know, even in the absence of real knowledge about the mathematical core of quantum mechanics, that there are different interpretations of its meaning — some of them pretty kooky. My idea: perhaps the upshot of QM is not that early 20th-century scientists proved that reality isn’t real and we should all go study Taoism (which is of a certain independent interest) as our guide to the cosmos, but that they had a sense of unease about things they knew without knowing why they knew them: the body of theory and experiment deriving from new instrumentation did not apperceptively close, the predictive power of certain frameworks (e.g., those deriving from the introduction of matrix methods, which arrived as something of a deus ex machina) could not be satisfactorily explained in terms of a unified theory meeting canons of simplicity. A similar sense of spookiness is to be had sometimes in social life, but that’s a thought for another time.
Short thought: we all know, even in the absence of real knowledge about the mathematical core of quantum mechanics, that there are different interpretations of its meaning — some of them pretty kooky. My idea: perhaps the upshot of QM is not that early 20th-century scientists proved that reality isn’t real and we should all go study Taoism (which is of a certain independent interest) as our guide to the cosmos, but that they had a sense of unease about things they knew without knowing why they knew them: the body of theory and experiment deriving from new instrumentation did not apperceptively close, the predictive power of certain frameworks (e.g., those deriving from the introduction of matrix methods, which arrived as something of a deus ex machina) could not be satisfactorily explained in terms of a unified theory meeting canons of simplicity. A similar sense of spookiness is to be had sometimes in social life, but that’s a thought for another time.