- #1
jon4444
- 68
- 1
I just read an excerpt from Philip Ball's new book and was disappointed by its hyperbolic, boosterish tone. He adopts the pose that physicists have made great strides in understanding what happens during measurement. Wave functions decohere, etc. He concludes by saying something like "now we just need to understand what causes this..."
Is this any better than saying "my new theory explains everything--superposition occurs when magic unicorns play with each other and then we observe only one state at measurement when the magic unicorns become angry with each other and are by themselves!"
Concretely, has there been contemporary advance in the mathematics that allows better predictions than what Heisenberg / Schroedinger et. al had available to them? Is this just a matter of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with a new interpretation (that, so far, doesn't seem to offer anything except hope...)?
Is this any better than saying "my new theory explains everything--superposition occurs when magic unicorns play with each other and then we observe only one state at measurement when the magic unicorns become angry with each other and are by themselves!"
Concretely, has there been contemporary advance in the mathematics that allows better predictions than what Heisenberg / Schroedinger et. al had available to them? Is this just a matter of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with a new interpretation (that, so far, doesn't seem to offer anything except hope...)?