[HN Gopher] It's time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead... ___________________________________________________________________ It's time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end Author : pseudolus Score : 14 points Date : 2022-03-08 21:56 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (nautil.us) (TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us) | earedpiece wrote: | I get your point, how long do we keep digging before we reach the | center of the earth? | | It is human nature to quit, most especially, when there is no | foreseeable benefits. | | But think about it this way, science is like the human body. | | The head of science, are those scientists who make a new | discovery by going through research articles of their | predescessors, who were just 1 mm from digging up gold. | | The necks are those scientists, who almost made a new discovery, | but couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. | | And the legs, are the early scientist like Galileo, who laid the | ground work. | | Anyways, wherever you find yourself, it is imperative you don't | lose faith in the process. | | Afterall, everybody mocked the Wright brothers, for building a | plane. And most advanced scientist question, why they venture | into this field called science, afterall it is a labor of love, | and only the lucky few get glorified. | | But I get your point through and through, it is better scientists | pour in their brains in more linear science, like things we can | see and computate, instead of pouring brain power in abstract | concept that has no current benefit in the present society. | stevebmark wrote: | Sigh, yet another Nautil.us article. One or two meaningful | paragraphs buried in a clickbait title by someone bored with | their own academic work. | jleyank wrote: | From the point of view of chemistry, QM "works". It provides | results that can be tested experimentally and predictions that | can be validated. There are issues with computability but that's | more engineering than science. Determining structure, spectra and | other physical properties is quite helpful. | | What was the cliche? All theories are wrong, some theories are | useful. It needs to be rephrased from vector codes into massively | parallel codes but people can work with that. | jiggawatts wrote: | To me, this always felt like programmers excusing abhorrent | code with "but it works". | | Quantum theory isn't. It's not a single, cohesive, consistent | theory.[1] There is no recipe you can apply, it's just a bunch | of guessworks and heuristics that _happen_ to produce the | numerically correct equations if you keep trying long enough. | This isn 't secret or some sort of external criticism, you'll | find this front-and-centre in the foreword of many a QM text! | | Schrodinger famously arrived at his equation basically through | numerical methods. He just tried things until it "fit" the | desired output. | | Now, there's nothing _wrong_ with this, per-se. It 's a | perfectly viable approach for getting going, for getting | _something_ and using it as a starting point. But it isn 't the | endpoint, because approaches like this often have virtually no | explanatory power. | | A similar example is collecting insects, categorising them, | giving them Latin names, and putting them up for display in a | museum. You can _learn a lot_ , amass enormous amounts of | information, but without a theory of genetics and natural | selection you will always be blind to the underlying truth of | it all. | | QM is just like bug collecting. We're collecting numerical | equations that work, but we have essentially no clear | understanding why. We've built a tree of life, and nobody has | had the lightbulb moment that explains _why_ it 's a tree. | | [1] There was a paper published a few years back where a bunch | of working quantum physicists were asked some simple multiple- | choice questions about the _fundamentals_ of the theory. There | was no consensus opinion on anything! PS: You 'll get similar | results if you ask priests of a random Christian sects about | the basics of religion. Conversely, you will get nearly zero | disagreement if asking Chemists about the basics of their | science. | spekcular wrote: | Come on. We have plenty of good heuristics for why things are | the way they are. Quantum theory is no more a bunch of | "guessworks and heuristic" than Newtonian mechanics. | | Also, physicists disagreeing on interpretational issues | related to quantum foundations is not the same thing as | disagreeing about the fundamentals of the theory. | tus666 wrote: | Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. | | All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is | simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self | propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment | cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or | quantization if formulated correctly. | | Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need | to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's hat. | geijoenr wrote: | For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, | trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum | Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in | the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the | current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the | limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will | take a modern day Copernicus to come up with a new view of | physics, that will result in simpler, more productive models, to | take us out of the local maximum we are in. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-08 23:00 UTC)