Feb 6, 2025 09:42 PM
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/24
EXCERPTS: . . . quantum mechanics wasn’t created all at once. It took several decades and was a messy, confused process, during most of which the true nature of this revolution was obscure. In some ways it still is. Looking back at the development of quantum theory reveals that the motivations for such a dramatic shift in how we think about the physical world were initially rather flimsy. So it is scarcely surprising that the new ideas—and what they meant—were hotly contested not only within a conservative “old guard” but even among those who proposed them. These ideas only emerged because of the readiness of some of the key players to take bold imaginative leaps beyond what the empirical evidence or rigorous logic seemed strictly to demand.
[...] The quantum revolution is often cited as a paradigm shift—a notion put forth by science historian Thomas Kuhn to characterize a scientific crisis that can only be resolved by some radical break with existing ideas. After the break, Kuhn said, the new paradigm becomes so natural that scientists cannot really imagine returning to the old way of thinking. Whether science really advances this way in general has been contested. But while Kuhn paints a picture of scientists clinging conservatively to old ideas for as long as they can, history suggests that radical new ideas are often not so much resisted as simply ignored or overlooked—sometimes even by those who conceive of them.
What’s more, at least in the case of quantum mechanics, it was not apparent from the outset quite where the real radicalism lay—which is to say, not in quantization but in the fundamentally probabilistic, apparently acausal, and nonlocal nature of quantum phenomena. Those characteristics are still the source of arguments a century later... (MORE - missing details, no obtrusive ads)
EXCERPTS: . . . quantum mechanics wasn’t created all at once. It took several decades and was a messy, confused process, during most of which the true nature of this revolution was obscure. In some ways it still is. Looking back at the development of quantum theory reveals that the motivations for such a dramatic shift in how we think about the physical world were initially rather flimsy. So it is scarcely surprising that the new ideas—and what they meant—were hotly contested not only within a conservative “old guard” but even among those who proposed them. These ideas only emerged because of the readiness of some of the key players to take bold imaginative leaps beyond what the empirical evidence or rigorous logic seemed strictly to demand.
[...] The quantum revolution is often cited as a paradigm shift—a notion put forth by science historian Thomas Kuhn to characterize a scientific crisis that can only be resolved by some radical break with existing ideas. After the break, Kuhn said, the new paradigm becomes so natural that scientists cannot really imagine returning to the old way of thinking. Whether science really advances this way in general has been contested. But while Kuhn paints a picture of scientists clinging conservatively to old ideas for as long as they can, history suggests that radical new ideas are often not so much resisted as simply ignored or overlooked—sometimes even by those who conceive of them.
What’s more, at least in the case of quantum mechanics, it was not apparent from the outset quite where the real radicalism lay—which is to say, not in quantization but in the fundamentally probabilistic, apparently acausal, and nonlocal nature of quantum phenomena. Those characteristics are still the source of arguments a century later... (MORE - missing details, no obtrusive ads)