There is nothing really bizarre about QM. The problem starts with not teaching classical mechanics the right way. Leonard Susskind has written a series of books entitled The Theoretical Minimum. These support each of his Stanford Lecture Series on a Topic. So Classical Mechanic is a good starting point. The lectures are really good if you have a minimal mathematical toolkit, but you might want the books to delve further.
The job of classical mechanics is to predict the future. He starts with extremely simple discrete systems to establish the concept of a state (a coin has two sides for instance) and the laws we infer from observation (measurement), before moving on to the concept of coordinates including equivalent coordinate systems, trigonometry, vectors, calculus and finally motion. It’s all really building up to something simpler than Newton Laws: The Principle of Least Action from which all the other Laws can be derived.
The stage is then set to introduce the concepts of symmetries and conservation laws (which restrict the possible solutions). The final step is the equivalent Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics, the meaning of energy and its relationship to time.
The Copenhagen interpretation is really an avoidance of explanation.
It says nothing about the ontology of quanta at all.
IMO, the Many Worlds theory is absurd and completely untestable and unprove-able - I find it hard to believe that it has found so many adherents and muddied the water even further.
The deBroglie-Bohm pilot wave model is more satisfying to my tastes, in part because it describes a way that an electron is (which at least could be tested in principle).
It makes all mystery vanish from the double slit expt.
(Of course, the main maths aspects are unchanged, the Schrodinger equation still describes the electron or other quantum field unit).
But in pilot wave theory the Schrodinger equation actually describes an electron as something we can visualize and understand - as a wave that is real and not a mere wave of probabilities.
Ontology of quanta is one thing, they couldn’t even be bothered to define what a measurement is supposed to be. Copenhagen is just like results from work meetings where people realize that they would never agree but need a result anyway, so eventually the boss badgers everyone into coming up with some handwaving text. And probably that’s exactly what it was
Yes, it was the result of a power struggle which played out for years, including at Solvay conferences.
A cop out that has plagued us for a century - motivated I think in large part because most of the key people had an aversion to the idea that matter (including all ‘solid’ objects) ultimately consists of waves, not [hard] particles.
I agree that pilot waves is pretty and intuitively pleasing. With many-worlds my issue is that even if it was testable and proven to be true, I’d feel compelled to just shrug “who cares” about a googol of worlds being created every instant that never interact.
There was something in a Sean Carroll podcast (highly recommended although he believes in many-worlds , www dot preposterousuniverse dot com and on YT *) about how convincing and probably intimidating Bohr was in person.
In the Mindscape podcast he had e.g. nearly 2 hours with Kip Thorne.
* on YT he also has the Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series in addition to the Mindscape podcast, I don’t think that’s on the website
The Biggest Ideas is a nice introduction, for a numpty like me, into basic physics that I should have learned at school, and I really like his voice and all. In the Mindscape series, he has many guests from other fields as well, and it’s just so nice to listen to two smart people having an extended conversation. Makes me fall into dreamland like a baby.
I think you are wrong to suggest that the physicists behind the early theory of QM thought that. There may have been discussion about the wave particle duality but that hardly amounts to a hard particle belief.
It was only as accelerators started becoming available at sub 1 MeV energies about 1930 that any form of studying the nucleus became possible. The hope was that nuclear tunnelling (a wave phenomenon) might reveal something, as penetrating the Coulomb barrier (the electric field) was certainly not possible. Elastic scattering is totally dominant even at much higher energies. Rutherford used alpha particle sources (radioactive decay) for his early work. Most work was aimed at radioactive decay. This indeed led to some estimates of the size of the nucleus, and with the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick in 1932 it became evident that a nuclear force was needed to hold the protons and neutrons within the nucleus. In effect the size of the hard part was always getting smaller and smaller. The interest was always in finding the most fundamental particles.
The duality was always of interest and it took more and more sophisticated experiments to reveal the fundamentally different thinking required for a Quantum theory. The Heisenberg Uncertainty (1927) marked the start of QM. Again Leonard Susskind’s book on QM the theoretical minimum is a much better read than any popular stuff that just mystifies the subject. Physics is always about interpreting experimental evidence. This evidence is still emerging, and understanding axioms such as the exclusion principle may never emerge. It’s just how nature works!
Well, if people are discussing whether an electron is a wave or a particle - surely by particle they mean a hard entity.
What else does particle mean?
And why are people still debating that today and stumbling over the results of the double slit expt which make perfect sense if there is only a wave in a field?
[Apologies to people looking for discussion of the telescope!]
The semantics are important in this issue of what things are made of.
I think most people in the world think that the universe made of (solid) objects drifting through space.
They do not mostly think of the world as made of sets of fields - where ‘objects’ are disturbances in multiple interacting energy fields - and spacetime itself is those fields.
And to the extend that a tiny section of people are aware of the double slit expt, I think that most of those people believe that it shows that the electron (or quantum particle) exhibits wave/particle duality.
But the expt doesn’t show duality - it just shows what a wave does as it passes through 2 slits.
Both of these things create general confusion concerning Physics and about the nature of reality.
But not quite, I think. The problem is that each individual impact of a photon on the detector still behaves as if it was a particle impact. Just the impact of many photons creates the wave-like interference pattern. There are also other experiments where you in fact do get a particle in certain measurement configurations and a wave in others
Apologies - I should perhaps not have opened up this issue as we are now into deep thread drift (although it is interesting).
As it’s Padded Cell, I will say that in a pilot wave type model I see the impact on the screen as the leading edge of the pilot wave impacting the screen at which instant the waves becomes decoherent i.e. the energy of the electron-wave collapses onto the screen at that first point of impact.
I’d love to see good quality counterarguments to the model I just outlined.
There is a strong Bohm revitalization now in some corners of Physics communities.
Not least, the philosopher of Physics, Tim Maudlin, leads one branch of it.
e.g. He wrote: “…Bohm’s theory posits no real collapse of the universal wave function, and since the uncollapsed universal wave function is never actually
employed in making any experimental predictions…”
‘Why Bohm’s Theory Solves the Measurement Problem’, Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 479-483
I doubt that Maudlin (or Bohm himself, if he were alive) would agree with what I outlined above about decoherence of the electron in the double slit expt.
So I’m not saying it’s part of variants of the standard pilot wave theory of either de Broglie or Bohm - I’m just saying that it could and should be a variant of pilot wave theory.
Yes, it will be months before they focus the lenses and calibrate and test the telescope and publish any images or results.
But I doubt that most people who are into telescopes want to wade through the speculative musings on Physics of you, me and Phil…which is now two thirds of the thread.
, www dot preposterousuniverse dot com and on YT *) about how convincing and probably intimidating Bohr was in person.