Dodging Heisenberg

Erwin Schrödinger

Now I shall try to give you an idea of the way in which physicists at present endeavour to overcome this failure. One might term it an ‘emergency exit’, though it was not intended as such, but as a new theory. I mean, of course, wave mechanics. (Eddington called it ‘not a physical theory but a dodge—and a very good dodge too’.) The situation is about as follows. The observed facts (about particles and light and all sorts of radiation and their mutual interaction) appear to be repugnant to the classical ideal of a continuous description in space and time. (Let me explain myself to the physicist by hinting at one example: Bohr's famous theory of spectral lines in 1913 had to assume that the atom makes a sudden transition from one state into another state, and that in doing so it emits a train of light waves several feet long, containing hundreds of thousands of waves and requiring for its formation a considerable time. No information about the atom during this transition can be offered.) So the facts of observation are irreconcilable with a continuous description in space and time 5 it just seems impossible, at least in many cases.

Anonymous

Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose

Now I shall try to give you an idea of the way in which physicists at present endeavour to overcome this failure. One might term it an ‘emergency exit’, though it was not intended as such, but as a new theory. I mean, of course, wave mechanics. (Edding-ton called it ‘not a physical theory but a dodge— and a very good dodge too’.) The situation is about as follows. The observed facts (about particles and light and all sorts of radiation and their mutual interaction) appear to be repugnant to the classical ideal of a continuous description in space and time. (Let me explain myself to the physicist by hinting at one example: Bohr's famous theory of spectral lines in 1913 had to assume that the atom makes a sudden transition from one state into another state, and that in doing so it emits a train of light waves several feet long, containing hundreds of thousands of waves and requiring for its formation a considerable time. No information about the atom during this transition can be offered.) So the facts of observation are irreconcilable with a continuous description in space and time; it just seems impossible, at least in many cases. On the other hand, from an incomplete description—from a picture with gaps in space and time—one cannot draw clear and unambiguous conclusions; it leads to hazy, arbitrary, unclear thinking—and that is the thing we must avoid at all costs! What is to be done?

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Marijus Masteika

Quest for Entropy #2: how a clockwork with no dice fakes quantum mechanics — the machine taken apart, the exam it passed, and the one wall it cannot get past. This is a demonstration, not a discovery about nature. It does not say our universe is a clockwork, does not reinterpret quantum mechanics, and does not dodge Bell's theorem — the hidden machinery is global, not local, exactly because Bell rules out the local kind (we checked). The recipe was found by an optimizer and only later shown to sit at a fixed point of the geometry; the build is engineering, and we say so. The claim is only this: quantum-looking behaviour can come out of a deterministic machine plus a physical measurement — not that this is why our world is quantum. Everything here describes one family of machines at the settings we tested, and where it fails, it fails in public.