The laws of quantum mechanics are couched in subtle mathematical language. The laws are not usually stated in a compact pedagogical form. Here I present a possible way to correct this. Essential facts can be distilled into seven statements that are easy to remember and easily referred back. Also, the current teaching of quantum mechanics is laden with words of negative connotations, originating as they did during the early decades of the subject when the subject was intellectually still puzzling. A wide variety of experiments in the intervening decades, not least those that were awarded the Nobel Prize of 2022 amply affirm the validity and substantial ``reality'' of Quantum Mechanics as a theory. I take a few of the inadequacies of classical framework to illustrate that some of the complaints against Quantum Mechanics are patently misplaced. Finally I discuss the bogeys such as ``wave article duality'', ``uncertainty'', ``indistinguishability'' ``statistics'' and ``entanglement'' and advocate adopting better terminology to save new learners from the old biases.
The laws of quantum mechanics are couched in subtle mathematical language. The laws are not usually stated in a compact pedagogical form. Here I present a possible way to correct this. Essential facts can be distilled into seven statements that are easy to remember and easily referred back. Also, the current teaching of quantum mechanics is laden with words of negative connotations, originating as they did during the early decades of the subject when the subject was intellectually still puzzling. A wide variety of experiments in the intervening decades, not least those that were awarded the Nobel Prize of 2022 amply affirm the validity and substantial reality'' of Quantum Mechanics as a theory. I take a few of the inadequacies of classical framework to illustrate that some of the complaints against Quantum Mechanics are patently misplaced. Finally I discuss the bogeys such as wave article duality'', uncertainty'', indistinguishability'' statistics'' and entanglement'' and advocate adopting better terminology to save new learners from the old biases.
Quantum mechanics is the newest science and should therefore be the most precise, but unfortunately, it's quite the opposite. If you don't understand quantum mechanics, ask yourself if I'm right, because others don't either. The field of experimental quantum mechanics is so vast and confusing that its theoretical practitioners will always have to adopt new explanations from their own context to conform to the facts of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was created in the early 20th century to establish mathematical and physical laws or rules for subatomic objects subject to an external potential field in order to explain so-called quantum systems. Studying the spatiotemporal evolution of a quantum system, defined as a microscopic subatomic system of low energy density subjected to a potential field, external or internal, is a rather complex subject. However, in 1927, the well-known Schrödinger PDE, valid for infinite free space subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions, was introduced. Schrödinger's PDE must be complemented by the Bohr/Copenhagen interpretation of the wave function Ψ involving the rules of quantum systems of instantaneous entanglement and superposition. We all know that the Schrödinger equation is incomplete because it lives and operates in the incomplete space R^4 and therefore the wave function Ψ is incomplete in itself and cannot be defined as scalar, a vector, nor a tensor. The complex wave function Ψ has never been properly defined. Moreover, the Schrödinger PDE is not Lorentz invariant and is not compatible with the special theory of relativity, and is obviously even less so with the general theory of relativity. However, quantum mechanics has come a long way, both in theory and practice, since 1927, nearly a century ago. This long journey has added even more illogical and confusing properties to the Ψ wave function, such as causality and wave function collapse. Many attempts have been made over the last century to reform the Schrödinger equation, the most notable being to combine it with the general theory of relativity, but all these attempts have been in vain. The breakthrough came in 2020-2024 [2,3,4], when the author of this article claimed to replace the classical Schrödinger equation Ψ with the PDE for its square Ψ^2, which is logical and physical. Ψ^2 is needed to express the quantum energy density flux (U(x,y,z,t) = Ψ^2 (x,y,z,t)) and we therefore propose a new Schrödinger equation for Ψ^2 which should have the form of the energy density diffusion PDE such as that of thermal conduction. Equation 3 should be supplemented by the advanced artificial intelligence proposed by the author [5,6]. Comparing Schrödinger's classical PDE of 1927 with the PDE proposed for Ψ^2 in 2020 shows that we currently have two different or distinct theories of quantum mechanics! Which one is more theoretically true and more practically useful? This is the purpose of this article.
The odd concepts of quantum physics are nearly a century old. They may seem difficult and forbidding at first sight, but the barrier to understanding is not their difficulty but their differentness . Unlike classical models, quantum theory does not attempt to simulate Nature. It gives us information about observations of Nature. But it does contain a “theoretical entity” that claims to contain all information, observation notwithstanding, namely the quantum state vector in Hilbert space. Scientists routinely use the language of Hilbert space, and nonscientists do not use it at all, which is understandable but unfortunate. A sort of baby-talk has become the lingua franca for much of the popular journalism of quantum physics, an awkward patois that combines some of the early groping language of Bohr, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg with more modern words about symmetries and states. Earnest amateurs still ask me about the mystery of Bohr orbits. There is no mystery because there are no orbits, except as historical curiosities. Same for “wave–particle duality.” Same for “quantum jumps.” A friend once asked me to address a philosophy seminar about the “paradoxes of quantum mechanics.” He said he had approached C. N. Yang first, who replied “What paradoxes?” There are some mathematical and logical rough spots in our current best theory of matter, and perhaps some of them can be framed as paradoxes. But the theory is actually rather straightforward, and it has a perfectly clear interpretation linked to experiments that, in their simplest form, anyone can perform (and students do routinely in college laboratories). No empirical observations are known that are inconsistent with the quantum framework.
Newton mechanics is great, Newton's contribution is indelible. But from Newton's classical mechanics, the definition of velocity (=) must mean that this physical parameter is a vector, so "negative velocity" only means the opposite direction of motion, no other meaning. It is difficult to understand negative velocity within the framework of classical mechanics. However, wave is a special form of material motion, wave mechanics has a unique method and meaning, and its concept and connotation are significantly different from classical mechanics. For example, wave velocity (whether phase velocity or group velocity) is a scalar quantity. "Negative wave velocity" does not mean that the direction of motion is reversed, but a special phenomenon that does not accord with causality from the surface view. In any case, research in recent decades has shown that negative wave velocity is not only theoretically possible, it has also been repeatedly shown to exist experimentally. Moreover, negative wave velocity is a special form of superluminal speed; The wave with negative velocity is the advanced wave. It corresponds to the leading solution of the basic equation of electromagnetic field and electromagnetic wave. The past practice (discarding the advanced solution) is wrong! As for causality, scientists have provided a new definition and interpretation. In short, both wave mechanics and quantum optics take a different approach from classical mechanics. This paper points out that it is unusual for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to be awarded to Alain Aspect and two others, since Aspect's experiments on the Bell inequality were completed in 1982, Which still stands today as a crucial experiment that proved Einstein's EPR paper wrong and quantum mechanics (QM) correct. Aspect's award in 2022 showed that mainstream physical community had been forced to accept that quantum entanglement existed and that the "light-speed limit" theory of SR was a mistake. This paper discusses the proposition "negative characteristic motion of electromagnetic wave" put forward by the author in 2013, pointing out that it is an inherent physical phenomenon reflecting symmetry in nature. In this paper, the faster-than-light motion of waves found in the near-field of antennas is discussed. In addition, the realizability of "time travel" is also discussed.
For a century, quantum theorists have been reading the mathematical entrails of quantum mechanics (QM) to divine the nature of quantum reality. But to little avail. In this paper a different approach is taken, namely to identify and explain the basic intuitive ideas involved in QM. This does not tell one how those basic `gears' all mesh together in the beautiful mathematics of QM. But this does give one some intuitive (\textit{anschaulich})) ideas about the quantum reality described in the seemingly hard-to-interpret mathematical framework.
The absence of a general consensus among physicists about the old question of the measurement induced state vector collapse in quantum mechanics is, at first sight, puzzling. It is true, of course that the question cannot, at least as yet, be settled by submitting it to the final decision of experiment. Still, one would like to understand better the main issue of disagreement which leads to such a wide variety of possible solutions. We believe that the origin of this disagreement lies in a fundamental ambiguity which exists in our understanding of the relation between quantum mechanics (QM) and classical statistical mechanics (CSM). For this reason we will start by discussing at length this ambiguity, whose clarification is, in our opinion, preliminary to any attempt to find a solution of the question which is the central theme of our Colloquium. We will come back to this question, therefore, only in the final part of this talk.
The list of basic axioms of quantum mechanics as it was formulated by von Neumann includes only the mathematical formalism of the Hilbert space and its statistical interpretation. We point out that such an approach is too general to be considered as the foundation of quantum mechanics. In particular in this approach any finite-dimensional Hilbert space describes a quantum system. Though such a treatment might be a convenient approximation it can not be considered as a fundamental description of a quantum system and moreover it leads to some paradoxes like Bell's theorem. I present a list from seven basic postulates of axiomatic quantum mechanics. In particular the list includes the axiom describing spatial properties of quantum system. These axioms do not admit a nontrivial realization in the finite-dimensional Hilbert space. One suggests that the axiomatic quantum mechanics is consistent with local realism.