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Physics World

The quantum truth is out there

Jim Al-Khalili

Published Jan 1, 2002• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In his Lateral thoughts article, Jonathan Dowling sees himself as impartial and not aligned to any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics–be it the Copenhagen, the many-worlds or the Bohmian interpretation (November 2001 p64). He explains his argument with the amusing metaphor of a ball trapped under the wall-to-wall carpet of his apartment. The ball, which represents the weirdness of quantum mechanics, can be pushed into different rooms (each corresponding to a different interpretation) but never removed.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/15/1/27

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In his Lateral thoughts article, Jonathan Dowling sees himself as impartial and not aligned to any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics–be it the Copenhagen, the many-worlds or the Bohmian interpretation (November 2001 p64). He explains his argument with the amusing metaphor of a ball trapped under the wall-to-wall carpet of his apartment. The ball, which represents the weirdness of quantum mechanics, can be pushed into different rooms (each corresponding to a different interpretation) but never removed.
Attitudes toward quantum mechanics differ interestingly from one generation of physicists to the next. The first generation are the founding fathers, who struggled through the welter of confusing and self-contradictory constructions to emerge with the modern theory of the atomic world and supply it with the “Copenhagen interpretation.” On the whole they seem to have taken the view that while the theory is extraordinarily strange (Bohr is said to have remarked that if it didn't make you dizzy then you didn't really understand it), the strangeness arises out of some deeply ingrained but invalid modes of thought. Once these are recognized and abandoned the theory makes sense in a perfectly straightforward way. The word “irrational,” which appears frequently in Bohr's early writings about the quantum theory, is almost entirely absent from his later essays. The second generation, those who were students of the founding fathers in the early postrevolutionary period, seem firmly—at times even ferociously—committed to the position that there is really nothing peculiar about the quantum world at all. Far from making bons mots about dizziness, or the opposite of deep truths being deep truths, they appear to go out of their way to make quantum mechanics sound as boringly ordinary as possible. The third generation—mine—were born a decade or so after the revolution and learned about the quantum as kids from popular books like George Gamow's. We seem to be much more relaxed about it than the other two. Few of us brood about what it all means, any more than we worry about how to define mass or time when we use classical mechanics. In contemplative moments some of us think the theory is wonderfully strange and others think it isn't; but we don't hold these views with great passion. Most of us, in fact, feel irritated, bored, or downright uncomfortable when asked to articulate what we really think about quantum mechanics. I'm one of the uncomfortable ones. If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be “Shut up and calculate!” But I won't shut up. I would rather celebrate the strangeness of quantum theory than deny it, because I believe it still has interesting things to teach us about how certain powerful but flawed verbal and mental tools we once took for granted continue to infect our thinking in subtly hidden ways.
It’s di cult to gauge where popular opinion stands among physicists on the question of interpretation. My personal view is that the majority of professional working physicists (engaged in academic or industrial research of one form or another) probably think in terms of the Copenhagen interpretation they were taught at university, if they worry about interpretations at all. e chances are that they spend their time calculating amplitudes and probabilities and rarely li their heads from the computer monitor to ask what all of it means.
What if quantum mechanics was never weird? For a century, we've treated superposition, entanglement, and wave function collapse as paradoxes demanding explanation. We've built interpretations (Copenhagen, Many Worlds, pilot waves) each trying to make sense of a reality that seems to defy common sense. This paper proposes we've been solving the wrong problem. Every major interpretation shares one assumption: that separability is fundamental, that the universe is made of distinct things in distinct places, and quantum mechanics somehow violates this. But what if we have it backwards? What if unity is the baseline, and separation is what emerges? Invert the assumption, and the paradoxes dissolve. Superposition isn't particles in two places; it's coherence that hasn't yet differentiated. Entanglement isn't spooky action at a distance; it's correlation that was never broken. Collapse isn't mysterious; it's self-reference crossing a threshold. The math stays the same. The predictions stay the same. What changes is the sense of paradox. This isn't mysticism. It's a formal reframe with testable implications, from quantum biology to consciousness correlates. The paper lays out the argument and invites pushback. I'm genuinely asking: where does this break? What am I missing? The framework is falsifiable, and I'd rather find the cracks now than later. Read it. Tell me where it fails.
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world. Rather, we can now see that everything is quantum: our everyday world is simply what quantum becomes at the human scale. But if quantum mechanics is right, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seems obvious or right—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.
There are multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics, 2 most famous interpretations are Copenhagen interpretation and many world interpretations. Copenhagen interpretation fails to explain the mechanism behind wave function collapse and many world interpretations avoid collapse by adding infinite branching worlds. Goal of this paper is to provide alternate interpretations which explains mechanism behind collapse using finite pre-existent unreal worlds. All quantum weirdness can be narrowed down to few postulates, if we consider every particle has a dedicated address in event horizon, every address has its own dedicated spacetime fabric, particles will have its projected shadows on other space time fabric and whenever there is interaction between true particle and other shadow particle, new address is assigned for both interacting particles and instantaneously all projected shadow becomes void. We perceive universe from collapse perspective only when particles collapse and new address are assigned, thus giving an illusion that we live in one universe but its result of interaction of multiple worlds. From new postulates we were able to explain how one of the entangled photons can decides other photons path in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment and thus helps us to removes problematic retro causality speculation to explain the phenomenon observed in this experiment.