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posted by n1 on Friday May 22 2015, @05:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the no dept.

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

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @08:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @08:02AM (#186364)

    Ahh, so that is why he spent all his days with abstract numbers on chalkboards simulating what might possibly be in a way that is descriptive of what has been seen before. To see the behavior of real things is not what math or physics does. Those disciplines describe behavior, which is not the same thing as the behavior of real things itself. Either that or Feynman should have paid more attention in composition such that his point would come across without the fallacies and definitive inconsistencies.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @07:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @07:22PM (#186610)

    The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.

    You could learn something from him about that.