If you asked a thousand physicists, they would all disagree. This statement could apply to any number of topics – whether the universe is infinite, what dark matter is made of, how to make wires conduct perfectly efficiently – but it isn’t just abstract. A few weeks ago, a team at Nature posed a question that divided the field in precisely this way. They surveyed 1100 physicists to ask their favoured interpretation of quantum mechanics. The result? They “disagree wildly”.
pull down to refresh
114 sats \ 2 replies \ @brunenzio 15 Aug
I was part of the people interviewed, and I can say that it may be very misleading to say that we disagreed wildly. There are very subtle issues on which there is no general consensus. These issues are very important, but disagreement is expected since they relate to aspects of quantum mechanics that are not yet possible to directly process experimentally, or that do not affect physical outcomes based on our current theoretical paradigms.
In a sense, disagreement in this type of matters is what drives progress.
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 16 Aug
Wow that's cool.
Did they provide accompanying clarifications on how all the possible interpretations? I also work with some "quantum mechanics" stuff, but i would not be able to explain how all these variations differ.
reply
118 sats \ 0 replies \ @brunenzio 16 Aug
They did not provide much clarification, but, if I remember correctly, there was always the option to say something like I don't know.
Personally, I had to search a little bit about the retrocausal and superdeterministic theories because I was not familiar with them. I think it's impossible to really know well all the subtleties of the various interpretation of QM.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingecko 16 Aug
Perhaps as we get closer to the "truth" of reality, we always run into paradoxes. Logical truth will choose a side, but perhaps the deeper truth is that both sides of the paradox are true.
reply