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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: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 23 2015, @03:10AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 23 2015, @03:10AM (#186755) Journal

    It is impossible to decide whether one of the integers is an under-watered hydrangea, since there is no meaning to the claim.

    Except that the sentence has meaning. A hydrangea is a plant while an integer is a abstract concept. Since abstract concepts aren't plants, the truth of the statement is readily determined. Further, the statement has meaning because it says something non-trivial. If we replaced integers and under-watered hydrangea with other nouns, we could end up with a sentence that was false or even had an indeterminate truth value.