"There’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics"

socratus

socratus
Dec 10, 2008
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www.worldnpa.org
We have successful quantum mechanics, we don't have quantum philosophy.
"There’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics"
/March 18, 2014 by Matthew Rave/
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The conventional wisdom among people who know a little bit of quantum mechanics is that quantum mechanics is weird.
The conventional wisdom is wrong. Quantum mechanics is not weird. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are weird.
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Quantum mechanics is an entirely mathematical theory.
It is arguably the most successful and powerful theory to come out of the 20th century.
Now, the mathematics of quantum mechanics are abstract and hard to visualize.
Nevertheless, people insist on trying to visualize anyway. And the result is all kinds of weirdness:
Schrödinger’s cat, wave-particle duality, the collapse of the wave function, many-worlds theory,
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. These ideas are all mental hoops that people have jumped
through to explain some unambiguous, concrete, abstract linear algebra.
The math is just math, and it works; what it means is anyone’s guess.
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Don’t like the many-worlds interpretation? Fine. Be a Copenhagenist.
Don’t like pilot waves? Great. Stick to your pet idea about superluminal communication.
Just remember that all of these competing interpretations make the exact same predictions,
so for all practical purposes they are the same.
Some people go so far as to say, just shut up and calculate.
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