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It has to be something kind of like pilot waves (not pilot waves exactly, but abstractly the same concept).
At least pilot waves explain how observing something alters the medium the pilot waves move around in (spacetime), which in turn affects the thing being observed.
Otherwise it’s just magic and that’s annoying.
Quantum physics are very strange and there is much we still do not understand. I like that we can’t explain a lot of things, because it leaves some spark alive in my head for mysticism and magic - although I truly believe everything is scientifically and mathematically explainable, the fact that we still can’t makes me feel better not worse for some reason.
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I don’t get it. Why does it screw you up?
It’s magic.
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I think quantum is basically solved and there’s no paradox in the theory, which is compatible with general and special relativity. Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto’s textbook on covariant loop quantum gravity outlines the full solution. Some of the math is too dense for me to read, but his popular books on the subject explain the basics of the solution quite well.
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Can we speed up the Deftones a bit here?
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When particles go through double slits they scatter behind the slits as if they were waves, in a classic wave pattern, unless the particles are observed (not interfered with, just observed) before they encounter the slits. If this happens, they scatter as particles not waves. 2 very distinct patterns with the only variable being where the particles are being observed, before or after the slits.
It basically guarantees either infinite (infinite) parallel (quantum immortal) universes exist, that we are living in a literal simulation, or that there really are gods screwing with us. None of this is overly appealing to me.
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you like baseball
Try drinking a beer and throwing a tennis ball for a dog, then you’ll be fine.
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does this mean that the Earth might be flat?
That depends if you observe Earth before or after the aliens crush it with a massive hydraulic press for their youtube channel
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Define “observed”.
To me this is where I think the non-magic comes in. Obviously something in the observing is affecting the medium (in whatever other dimension or thing we don’t understand) that the particle moves in.
We don’t understand it, and we may never understand it. But it’s not magic. It’s not like if God told me which state the particle/wave was in - it would immediately collapse into particle behavior. It can’t read minds. It can however possibly go backward in time - which creates all kinds of weird situations that seem like paradoxes.
I’ve read it described like this: imagine an opaque latex sheet that’s been stretched tight. Sometimes we see a protuberance moving along in some direction in the latex sheet. It can move at different speeds, it can have different shapes, it can move around in circles, it can protrude more or less, etc.
We can measure all that stuff. But what we can’t see is that the protuberance is actually the corner of a large pointy-sided object moving around behind the latex sheet. We also can’t see the various pointy-sided objects interacting with each other, causing inexplicable behavior among the latex protuberances.
The protuberances in this case are the effect of something that exists outside our observable universe, like in another dimension or something, poking briefly into our world. I bet fundamental particles are something like that - corners of much more complicated objects moving around in higher dimensions or some other realm we’ll never be able to observe.
Kinda like how the movement of the planets was so complicated until they plugged it into a model that went around the sun, then everything made sense. Technically the astronomers who did all the complicated equations to model planet behavior before realizing they all revolved around the sun were right - in that they could predict where the planets would go next. But they didn’t have the whole picture at all.
So if Tyco Brahe or whoever (I forget if he was on the earth-centric side) said “Just accept it, the planets move very strangely” - no, I’m not going to accept that. There is some deeper reality we just don’t understand.
I’m not saying we’ll ever have that breakthrough with quantum mechanics. I can fully accept that it’s something we’ll never understand. But then again maybe we will.
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The curious thing is that we do understand it. You can set up the problem, do the math, and take measurements that agree with your math spot-on. Most guys spend their whole careers not worrying too much about what’s “really” going on. You only really get into trouble if you ask silly questions like what the cat looks like when it’s not being looked at, or if you insist that things really do have a precise location in space.
Just like you could fully calculate the movement of the planets before realizing they rotated around the sun. Doesn’t mean they fully understood what was going on.
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