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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: 1) by dingus on Friday May 22 2015, @06:13PM
We have experimentally verified quantum theory too many times to count. Ever heard of the double-slit experiment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @10:13PM
Ever heard of the double-slit experiment with macroscopic objects? No? Didn't think so. Because that hasn't been done.
The point is, we know quite well that quantum mechanics works well for electrons. But that doesn't prove that it still works for cats. The question is: Does is still work for macroscopic objects, and if not, at which point does it stop working?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by boristhespider on Friday May 22 2015, @10:45PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence [wikipedia.org]
Knock yourself out. No-one sane has ever pretended that the frequently-publicised consequences of QM apply observationally on macroscopic scales except in particular situations such as macroscopic Schroedinger cat states. The reason is that if you start lumping between 10^10 and 10^20 atoms together, the interactions between the wavefunctions of each of these is so complicated and so likely to *not* reinforce that you end up with an average behaviour. Sure, in an evolving system, one in every 1/10^20 or 10^30 times you may just get one of the particles acting slightly oddly, but the bulk behaviour, which we observe and which maps directly onto thermodynamics, is very different.
The details are horrific, but yeah, it's about "decoherence".