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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 physicsmajor on Friday May 22 2015, @04:07PM
You completely failed to read/understand what I wrote. As I very clearly state, there is nothing wrong with QM. I cast no stones, and in fact the very example you appear to have misread or misinterpreted was included specifically because of the direct success of predictions made by QM.
It appears you're projecting, and I dismiss ad hominem attacks. Please make at least three attempts to read and understand what I wrote before you post again.
"Real science" isn't just impenetrable technological terms, spiced up with run-on sentences and bad grammar. It's at least as important to properly and correctly convey the findings to the public. Randal Munroe's new book Thing Explainer uses just most common 100 words in the English language to explain very technical things. He's close to taking things to the absurd, but the point is that you can explain these things to lay people and that empowers both the work and the public.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @07:07PM
Are you sure you are responding to me, or did you mean to respond to the AC before me (the one who answered you directly)? You could help by reading my response to that AC and see that I am generally in agreement with you. However, you might need to read it three times to see that.