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Explaining Quantum Weirdness

| 1 Comment

Quantum Physics offers some weird results, to say the least. Paul Quincey, a physicist at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, points out just how weird the concept of gravity is, when you think about it. And offers an explanation that offers a much clearer philosophical view of some key quantum physics results. From the Nov/Dec 2008 Skeptical Inquirer, "Quantum Weirdness: An Analogy from the Time of Newton"

"...the borderlands of scientific knowledge have always contained some ideas considered virtually supernatural at the time, and it is instructive to see with hindsight how such ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected by mainstream science. Second, there are illuminating parallels between gravity and quantum theory that may help us come to terms with the current philosophical difficulties surrounding quantum theory."

I like this quote best:

"The choice we are presented with is not between a conspiracy and a reality that falls apart when we try to come to grips with it - it is between a conspiracy and a reality that falls into place, bit by bit, just in time. The world may not be as real as we might like it to be, but it is as real as it needs to be."

Hat tip to Jack Wheeler for the pointer.

1 Comment

The article is very lucid as far as it goes but it is really arguing a pragmatic position. I don't think a deeper philosophical resolution is possible as long as nonlocality can only be described negatively, ie. as a non-something instead of as a something.

The author makes the useful point that science advances by questioning at progressively deeper levels those foundational assumptions, such as the notion of a reality in which all properties are defined, that experimental evidence can no longer support. The question now may be what deeper foundational assumptions remain.

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