Hunter said:
Hi folks! I have finally returned after quite a while. I recently picked up several books from the library including "Taking the quantum Leap" by Fred Alan Wolf, "Schroedingers(sp) Kittens and the search for the new reality" By John Gribbins and Ben Bova's "The story of Light". All of these books discuss quantum mechanics, and all of them seem to state that reality is..well...mutable. It exists only when observed/thought about/ Interacted with.
The whole "collapse of the wave function" thing is pretty mind blowing. What do you folks think of all this? I have to admit that I really want to side with Einstein on this and attribute all of this weirdness to "undiscovered factors". But the evidence seems pretty strong for some of the stranger interpretations of quantum theory. So, are you in-the-closet supporters of Einstein, or have you all resigned yourself to the utter nuttiness of QM?
Congratulations; you should have a lot of fun with this.
To those who claim that they have not seen evidence of QM, I must point out that your eyes work, and the transistors in your computer works. They wouldn't work without QM.
A lot of the so-called "nuttiness" of QM is historical and results from what people went through when discovering quantum behavior, trying to reconcile it with ordinary, everyday assumptions about the world. There's a lot of detritus hanging around from the early days, such as the "wave-particle duality" and the "observer" that actually represent states of confusion. This is compounded by the fact that popular treatments tend to view the "nuttiness" as more elementary and describe it first, and many people tend not to get past that.
The actual math that works extremely well in describing the quantum world and fits reality to a T is actually quite reasonable and easy to understand. I suggest ignoring string theory for a while and concentrating on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), which describes everything outside the nucleus, including everyday experiences. I suggest Richard Feynman's
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter or, even better, the videotapes of the lectures on which the book was based, which you can get from
http://www.tuvatrader.com. The book, however, is a lot cheaper.
The problem is that this nice, clean, simple math doesn't seem to fit in with all of the everyday metaphysical assumptions people have been carrying around for thousands of years. The weirdness comes when we try to reconcile it with those assumptions. Like, for instance, if we want to believe that an electron is a particle like a Euclidean point and a photon travels a path like a Euclidean line, and something definitely happened, and this caused that, and time goes forward, and so on, we quickly run into contradictions.
However, there seems to be some leeway in exactly which assumptions we have to discard, and which we get to keep. To resolve the cognitive dissonance, people have come up with interpretations of quantum theory. These are not part of science, and as far as I know will never be, because they all agree with the basic math that agrees with experiment. The "wavefunction collapse" is a part of some of them, but in others the wavefunction doesn't collapse, and in others it decoheres. In some, the electron definitely does go through one slit or the other, but in others it doesn't. There are something like half a dozen interpretations in common currency, and many more minority interpretations.
As for Einstein, well, he didn't live to see the results of Bell's inequality, which is strong evidence against local hidden variables. and he would certainly have rejected non-locality.
