Sunday, September 15, 2019
Philosophy
Uncle de-I sent me this article, which is worth a read if you like learning a bit about physics. (Don't worry, there's not a single equation.) I agree completely with the author. As a community, physicists have decided it is not part of the discipline to understand why quantum mechanics is the way it is. Instead, it is just our job to use the equations. In fact, this view is so pervasive that it wasn't until I took a philosophy of quantum mechanics course (in the philosophy department, not physics, of course) that I even became aware of the fact that we don't discuss the meaning of quantum mechanics. That is, it never even occurred to me until that moment that discussing what wave functions, observers, or reality are were questions that people could ask. I guess that's why we travel to other cultures, be those places China or the world of philosophy - we suddenly realize that things we accept as fundamentally and unequivocally true are actually just assumptions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Ah the power of dogma
RM, I would disagree with something here. I don't think it is that "we" have decided is not important to learn why QM is what it is. It is true that we teach it this way, I mention something like this in my class almost every day. I think the issue is that to be able to address the "why" question, "we" feel that there is so much knowledge one should have that we haven't figured out how to communicate that struggle to the masses.
This is pretty much the case in most of physics, but in QM it is the case that nobody knows really "why", even if some are working hard to figure it out.
I see it in a similar fashion as the years before 1905, the relativity and quantum revolution. The "establishment" was happy and thought that they had figured out all the physics. Some new people came along to challenge this and build a new "modern" physics. I think in QM we are in the process of getting that kind of revolution, but it is just hard.
-R
Post a Comment