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Physics World

Quantum inheritance and the ongoing quest for meaning

Philip Ball

Published May 1, 2020• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Collections of essays often have an uncertain status. In the absence of any overarching message, they stand or fall on the quality of the writing and the author’s ability to offer regular jolts of insight and entertainment. When (full disclosure) David Kaiser told me last summer that he was putting the finishing touches to his anthology Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World, I had little doubt that it would meet the challenge.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/33/5/32

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Collections of essays often have an uncertain status. In the absence of any overarching message, they stand or fall on the quality of the writing and the author’s ability to offer regular jolts of insight and entertainment. When (full disclosure) David Kaiser told me last summer that he was putting the finishing touches to his anthology Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World, I had little doubt that it would meet the challenge.
During some heavy cleaning, I happened to notice Sam Schweber’s review of David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (Physics Today, September 2011, page 59).I was a graduate student at Brandeis University in 1960–62, but I quit to work in the defense industry. I did so mainly because Schweber and others discouraged my claim that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect implied a faster-than-light information transfer. That was years before Bell’s theorem. I had gotten the idea from reading David Bohm’s Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1951) in my senior year at Cornell University and David Inglis’s 1961 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the tau–theta puzzle. Schweber and the others basically told me to “shut up and calculate.” I finished my PhD at the University of California, Riverside, in August 1969 after a master’s at UC San Diego in 1967.Schweber’s review gives the false impression in the first paragraph that Elizabeth Rauscher’s Fundamental Fysiks Group was merely “a small group of graduate students.” That is a gross misrepresentation of Kaiser’s clear text to the contrary. Most of the members, including department head Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, John Clauser, Nick Herbert, and me, already had PhDs. In addition, Herbert was not a “peripheral member” of the group but a core member from the beginning. And finally, Schweber’s claim that Bell’s theorem was not obscure prior to 1975 is falsified by the statistics that Kaiser presents very clearly in his book.© 2013 American Institute of Physics.
08 April 1996, “Hartle/Coleman Comments” I like the grass fire analogy: I agree we should stomp it out if we can. However, as with most debates, I imagine we'll just have to wait until it falls by the wayside … or wait until someone gives it a name like the Modern Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics with Sugar on Top, so that everyone else will just discount it and move on. Do you know whether Coleman has published any of this? Wojciech first told me about it at least a year ago (and told me I should contact Coleman concerning it to “help your career along”). If you have a copy of the paper, please send it my way. I've been at a little disadvantage in thinking about this because I cannot find my copy of Hartle's paper and the library has been shut down since Wednesday evening; I'll be able to get a new copy Tuesday morning. I know I liked the paper very much after turning semi-Bayesian because of what it said in words (even though I never agreed with the mathematics); however, it certainly did have a frequentist streak running through it … and that's what's bringing us back now. I think what I'll do in this note is just write down various thoughts as they come to me; I've got a few pieces of junk spread out on my desk to prod me along.
The untold story of the heretical thinkers who dared to question the nature of our quantum universeEvery physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments. As a result, questioning the status quo long meant professional ruin. And yet, from the 1920s to today, physicists like John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth.