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 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. :)