May 28, 2024 07:38 PM
(This post was last modified: May 28, 2024 07:45 PM by C C.)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the-i...-mechanics
EXCERPT: Quantum mechanics is a hybrid of genuine and ironic science. In its mathematical form, quantum mechanics is the most powerful, precise theory ever discovered; it has withstood countless tests. The theory is ironic in the sense that its meaning is maddeningly ambiguous.
Experts have proposed many “interpretations” of quantum mechanics, which purport to explain what it means. Just sticking to ones I mention in the book I wrote on my quantum experiment, there are the Copenhagen, pilot-wave, many-worlds, many-minds, relational, it-from-bit, QBism, If-ism and agential-realism interpretations.
I see all these interpretations as ironic, not to be taken seriously, because they cannot be experimentally distinguished from each other. Choosing one interpretation over another is a matter of taste, not truth. You dig "many worlds", I’m into "it from bit".
Contemplating this situation, and recalling Sabine’s ironic prediction, I came up with the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s really a meta-interpretation, which says there can be no definitive interpretation of quantum mechanics, no final statement of what it means. This is the implicit position of physics professors who disdain interpretation and command students to “Shut up and calculate.”
Einstein and his intellectual heirs, notably physicists David Bohm and John Bell, reject the shut-up-and-calculate stance, insisting that physics must be more than a set of formulas for cranking out predictions and applications. They want truth.
The ironic interpretation encompasses both seemingly contradictory positions. You keep trying to understand quantum mechanics while acknowledging that final understanding will always elude you, because words, numbers and all means of representing “reality” fall short. This perspective resembles negative theology, which tries to describe God while stipulating, as an axiom, that God transcends description.
A corollary of the ironic interpretation is pluralism, the idea that there are many ways to see the world. Engineers are pluralists without making a fuss over it. Faced with a problem like building a new bridge over the Hudson, engineers don’t ask, What is the final, definitive, true solution to this problem? That sort of thinking is dumb, counterproductive. The engineer’s job is to find a solution that works.
A solution can work in lots of ways.... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED: How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory
EXCERPT: Quantum mechanics is a hybrid of genuine and ironic science. In its mathematical form, quantum mechanics is the most powerful, precise theory ever discovered; it has withstood countless tests. The theory is ironic in the sense that its meaning is maddeningly ambiguous.
Experts have proposed many “interpretations” of quantum mechanics, which purport to explain what it means. Just sticking to ones I mention in the book I wrote on my quantum experiment, there are the Copenhagen, pilot-wave, many-worlds, many-minds, relational, it-from-bit, QBism, If-ism and agential-realism interpretations.
I see all these interpretations as ironic, not to be taken seriously, because they cannot be experimentally distinguished from each other. Choosing one interpretation over another is a matter of taste, not truth. You dig "many worlds", I’m into "it from bit".
Contemplating this situation, and recalling Sabine’s ironic prediction, I came up with the ironic interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s really a meta-interpretation, which says there can be no definitive interpretation of quantum mechanics, no final statement of what it means. This is the implicit position of physics professors who disdain interpretation and command students to “Shut up and calculate.”
Einstein and his intellectual heirs, notably physicists David Bohm and John Bell, reject the shut-up-and-calculate stance, insisting that physics must be more than a set of formulas for cranking out predictions and applications. They want truth.
The ironic interpretation encompasses both seemingly contradictory positions. You keep trying to understand quantum mechanics while acknowledging that final understanding will always elude you, because words, numbers and all means of representing “reality” fall short. This perspective resembles negative theology, which tries to describe God while stipulating, as an axiom, that God transcends description.
A corollary of the ironic interpretation is pluralism, the idea that there are many ways to see the world. Engineers are pluralists without making a fuss over it. Faced with a problem like building a new bridge over the Hudson, engineers don’t ask, What is the final, definitive, true solution to this problem? That sort of thinking is dumb, counterproductive. The engineer’s job is to find a solution that works.
A solution can work in lots of ways.... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED: How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory