[HN Gopher] It's time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead...
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It's time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end
Author : pseudolus
Score : 14 points
Date : 2022-03-08 21:56 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| earedpiece wrote:
| I get your point, how long do we keep digging before we reach the
| center of the earth?
|
| It is human nature to quit, most especially, when there is no
| foreseeable benefits.
|
| But think about it this way, science is like the human body.
|
| The head of science, are those scientists who make a new
| discovery by going through research articles of their
| predescessors, who were just 1 mm from digging up gold.
|
| The necks are those scientists, who almost made a new discovery,
| but couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel.
|
| And the legs, are the early scientist like Galileo, who laid the
| ground work.
|
| Anyways, wherever you find yourself, it is imperative you don't
| lose faith in the process.
|
| Afterall, everybody mocked the Wright brothers, for building a
| plane. And most advanced scientist question, why they venture
| into this field called science, afterall it is a labor of love,
| and only the lucky few get glorified.
|
| But I get your point through and through, it is better scientists
| pour in their brains in more linear science, like things we can
| see and computate, instead of pouring brain power in abstract
| concept that has no current benefit in the present society.
| stevebmark wrote:
| Sigh, yet another Nautil.us article. One or two meaningful
| paragraphs buried in a clickbait title by someone bored with
| their own academic work.
| jleyank wrote:
| From the point of view of chemistry, QM "works". It provides
| results that can be tested experimentally and predictions that
| can be validated. There are issues with computability but that's
| more engineering than science. Determining structure, spectra and
| other physical properties is quite helpful.
|
| What was the cliche? All theories are wrong, some theories are
| useful. It needs to be rephrased from vector codes into massively
| parallel codes but people can work with that.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| To me, this always felt like programmers excusing abhorrent
| code with "but it works".
|
| Quantum theory isn't. It's not a single, cohesive, consistent
| theory.[1] There is no recipe you can apply, it's just a bunch
| of guessworks and heuristics that _happen_ to produce the
| numerically correct equations if you keep trying long enough.
| This isn 't secret or some sort of external criticism, you'll
| find this front-and-centre in the foreword of many a QM text!
|
| Schrodinger famously arrived at his equation basically through
| numerical methods. He just tried things until it "fit" the
| desired output.
|
| Now, there's nothing _wrong_ with this, per-se. It 's a
| perfectly viable approach for getting going, for getting
| _something_ and using it as a starting point. But it isn 't the
| endpoint, because approaches like this often have virtually no
| explanatory power.
|
| A similar example is collecting insects, categorising them,
| giving them Latin names, and putting them up for display in a
| museum. You can _learn a lot_ , amass enormous amounts of
| information, but without a theory of genetics and natural
| selection you will always be blind to the underlying truth of
| it all.
|
| QM is just like bug collecting. We're collecting numerical
| equations that work, but we have essentially no clear
| understanding why. We've built a tree of life, and nobody has
| had the lightbulb moment that explains _why_ it 's a tree.
|
| [1] There was a paper published a few years back where a bunch
| of working quantum physicists were asked some simple multiple-
| choice questions about the _fundamentals_ of the theory. There
| was no consensus opinion on anything! PS: You 'll get similar
| results if you ask priests of a random Christian sects about
| the basics of religion. Conversely, you will get nearly zero
| disagreement if asking Chemists about the basics of their
| science.
| spekcular wrote:
| Come on. We have plenty of good heuristics for why things are
| the way they are. Quantum theory is no more a bunch of
| "guessworks and heuristic" than Newtonian mechanics.
|
| Also, physicists disagreeing on interpretational issues
| related to quantum foundations is not the same thing as
| disagreeing about the fundamentals of the theory.
| tus666 wrote:
| Yes, but go back to philosophy not math.
|
| All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is
| simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self
| propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment
| cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or
| quantization if formulated correctly.
|
| Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need
| to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's hat.
| geijoenr wrote:
| For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics,
| trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum
| Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in
| the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the
| current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the
| limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will
| take a modern day Copernicus to come up with a new view of
| physics, that will result in simpler, more productive models, to
| take us out of the local maximum we are in.
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