Quantum Milestones, 1935: What’s Wrong with Quantum Mechanics?

Tim Folger

Fred-Rick Schermer

Jesús Felipe, John S. L. McCombie

Prologue: 'Not even wrong'The physicist Wolfgang Pauli was, with Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, one of the early leaders in the development of quantum mechanics.He was renowned for being a tough audience, exclaiming 'wrong' (falsch), or 'completely wrong' (ganz falsch) when he disagreed with a speaker.Near the end of his life, when asked his opinion of a recent article by a younger physicist, he sadly said 'it is not even wrong' (Das ist nicht einmal falsch) . . .A scientific idea is 'not even wrong' if it is so incomplete that it cannot be used to make predictions that could be compared to observations to see if the idea is wrong.

Rowan Brad Quni-Gudzinas

The renormalization group (RG) and harmonic quantum mechanics share a deep structural isomorphism rooted in the spectral decomposition of self-adjoint operators under scale transformations. We identify five pillars of this isomorphism and apply it retrospectively to evaluate Planck's UV catastrophe resolution (1900), Einstein's photoelectric effect (1905), and ten subsequent QM/QFT/SM milestones from Bohr through the Higgs mechanism. A comprehensive Bayesian update across ten interpretative parameters shifts posterior weight decisively toward the harmonics-first interpretation, converging on the thesis that the harmonic oscillator is the universal grammar of quantum theory and the RG is its scale-space syntax.

Hans‐Hennig von Grünberg, Alex Griffiths