“…To those uncomfortable with quantum theory’s picture of wavelike particles that are simultaneously everywhere, their message in The Quantum Universe is clear: tough. Scientists are, they tell us, “not mandated to produce a theory that bears any relation to the way we perceive the world at large”, although you might comfort yourself with the thought that even Einstein found quantum mechanics disturbing.” (via New Scientist).
Related :
- Making Sense of It All (online.wsj.com)
- Paul Dirac: The unsung genius (news.bbc.co.uk)
- Mysticism in quantum mechanics (wrongscience.wordpress.com)
- Releasing Schrodinger’s Cat from its box (cordus.wordpress.com)
- Creating Quantum Matter (usnews.com)
- The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw: review (telegraph.co.uk)
Ordinary language is inadequate to visualize and describe quantum electrodynamical interactions, so understanding depends on one’s computational ability to manage the equations involved. Or, almost as demanding, to understand Feynman’s diagrams.
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QM is weird because it is divorced from physical reality. That in turn is a consequence of the method used: mathematical modelling, The maths comes first, and any coherent physical descriptive explanation is considered a bonus (not a necessity). That’s not a robust approach, and it certainly isn’t ‘physical’ science.
So we have a dominant thinking within physics that expresses like this: ‘is it really possible to derive the laws of physics from pure mathematics without any reference to empirical observations? If the Theory of Theories is correct then the answer should be yes.’ http://www.weburbia.com/pg/tot.htm
Personally, I am not convinced that maths is all thee is. I think the deeper problem is that physics has not yet found the right conceptual foundation on which to base its mathematical models. I’m not saying that our cordus conjecture is necessarily that foundation, but simply that it could be worth exploring new concepts at the foundational level. And we show one way to achieve that.
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Kurt Godel demonstrated that all representational systems powerful enough to describe reality (math, for example) can contain propositions whose truth or falsehood cannot be determined.
See also Greg Egan’s latest novel, The Clockwork Spaceship, for his take on a universe where the math of physics has a plus changed to a minus in one equation.
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