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Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud.
Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. “If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true,” he says. “Otherwise we're not doing science, we're just explaining some funny squiggles on a blackboard.”
It is this sentiment that has led Maroney and others to develop a new series of experiments to uncover the nature of the wavefunction — the mysterious entity that lies at the heart of quantum weirdness. On paper, the wavefunction is simply a mathematical object that physicists denote with the Greek letter psi (Ψ) — one of Maroney's funny squiggles — and use to describe a particle's quantum behaviour. Depending on the experiment, the wavefunction allows them to calculate the probability of observing an electron at any particular location, or the chances that its spin is oriented up or down. But the mathematics shed no light on what a wavefunction truly is. Is it a physical thing ? Or just a calculating tool for handling an observer's ignorance about the world ?
http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-physics-what-is-really-real-1.17585
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday May 22 2015, @07:54AM
> Alright, the entire universe could be a virtual construct. We have no way of proving it is not.
I keep thinking that this is badly formulated. The definition of real vs simulated is not absolute but relative to the observer. The universe is real by definition, like the disposition of pieces on a board is reality for the chess piece, because it's on the same level of abstraction, while at the same time it is "virtual" for us residing in the meta universe where such an abstraction was conceived. Nothing else can influence the chess piece other than the position of other pieces and the rules of the game. The cat that messes up the board messes up an implementation, not the abstraction called "the game of chess", even if its effect can optionally be definitive for the game itself, so technically the cat is omnipotent wrt a particular game, and so on...
So the universe is real, we have no way of proving it to be an abstraction for a meta universe, and wondering whether the universe looks or not like it's simulated is circular because we conceived simultations by looking at the universe.
Back to the wave function, if all it yields is accurate probability figures then it's a fraud, if it yielded accurate predictions then it would be a model. It explains nothing because nothing can be explained from the inside.
In other words, there is out there an infinite number of math constructs that accurately model the probability of "me choosing to go out and eat a pizza vs staying home". All but one, or all of them are frauds. There is no problem because, as you say, all we need is that they are useful.
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 22 2015, @08:35AM
Back to the wave function, if all it yields is accurate probability figures then it's a fraud, if it yielded accurate predictions then it would be a model.
Please explain how accurate probability is different from accurate prediction, for values of less than 100%? We do not have a LaPlacian certainty, only a pragmatic possibility, which was the original point? (Hey, is this a Russian thing? )
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday May 22 2015, @09:44AM
It's all uncertain. As in architecture, we Kant tell if its Wright or Knott. :)