gill1109 wrote:I agree, Fred! I feel with every fibre of my being that reality is not an illusion. I think that quantum theory is inconsistent. I think we need what Slava Belavkin called "eventum mechanics". Today I propose to call it "martingale-like disciplined passion at a distance", thereby honouring Abner Shimony and Paul Lévy and Joy Christian (who talks of the exquisite *discipline* of the quantum correlations).
But you could also just say "quantum-non-locality". Or in other words still, I would say that one just has to grow up and accept the facts of life. Which really comes down to "shut up and calculate". We don't *need* an interpretation as long as there are no experiments that can distinguish between interpretations. I am pretty sure that we are never going to get an interpretation which we like because of the limitations of our own brains.
Anyway, I firmly believe that an even deeper theory underlying QM and relativity theory, of which the QM predictions are merely an "emergent property" in the appropriate limiting circumstances, would necessarily be weirder still. I believe that that is what my colleague Gerard 't Hooft thinks.
You could also say that I have finally gone completely bonkers. I have no problem with that.
I don't think quantum theory is inconsistent. It is the interpretations that are inconsistent. It is Bohr and Heisenberg that started this mess. Mermin and Feynman tried to fix it with "shut up and calculate". Which I suppose supports my "quantum mechanics is about real probability factors for real physical events and that is it". All the weird stuff comes from other interpretations. And there is no "passion at a distance". You can continue to let Nature trick you into believing that, but we know better since there exists a local realistic model that explains it.
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Posted: Sat May 25, 2019 4:48 am