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It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

nautil.us

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Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#41

Post by alar44 »

dekhn wrote: post #22
jleyank wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite stamp collecting, although botany or anatomy head in that direction. Call chemistry “just applied physics” as engineering is “just applied science”.

It's a quote ascribed to Rutherford ("all science is physics or just stamp collecting"). I also heard it when studying protein structures in the 90s (the idea being, if you're just a crystallographer cranking out more structures, you're doing stamp collecting; the real reason to determine structures is to elucidate the general principles of protein folding and function). Note that protein structure prediction finally…

We absolutely understand protein folding. The fact there isn't a closed form simple solution to tell us the shape of a protein shouldn't be surprising at all. It's just hard to calculate. It's like the 3 body problem, but there are 90. I don't know why you think there would be some simple solution to that that doesn't involve simulation and heavy computation. You'd need 8 dimensional 100x100 matrices or something to describe something like a protein in pure math, which is way more like programming than arithmetic anyway.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#42

Post by vba616 »

tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

Is this different from the conventional, orthodox view?

I feel like I've seen experts say that yes, the fields are real, and particles are approximate descriptions.

But if it means anything, it's math.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

No. "Particle" and "wave" are analogies. They're not even wrong, because they're not descriptions of what actually happens.

The real problem is we don't have an analogy for what actually happens, because - by everyday expectations - the traditional interpretations are beyond weird. And the more recent interpretations are even weirder than that.

It's likely - after Bell - that there's something non-local happening. And after this paper it's likely that whatever it is may not even be compatible with a stable identity for the observer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-021-00589-1

Which seems to be arguing that instead of many worlds, there are many observers - not just simultaneously, but sequentially.

In other words, it's our belief in a consistent self with stable memories that may be wrong.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#44

Post by [deleted] »

tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

[deleted]

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#45

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

not1ofU wrote: post #23
wpietri wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point to some articles on this? It's way outside of my field, but it sounds very interesting.

This is cool IMO (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY Apologies if its considered off topic - I see double slit experiment and I always think of this. It blew my mind.

Crackpot vibes

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#46

Post by tkluck »

8bitsrule wrote: post #28

Even on the macro level there are lots of tricky questions. A bar magnet is surrounded by magnetic flux lines. Apparently it takes no energy to maintain that magnetic field. If I heat the bar in boiling water for long enough, it becomes demagnetized. On the macro level there's no visible/measureable change in the bar. We need a lot of magnification to see that the 'particles are no longer aligned'. On the other hand,…

> some of the filings will fly up against gravity to the bar, against the force of gravity. It takes energy to lift these filings. Where does that energy come from?

In this example the energy comes from whatever is holding the bar magnet itself up against gravity. If it's not doing any work (ie. it's not adding energy; say it's a rope or a spring) then it's not just the filings that move: the bar magnet and the filings move towards each other (with the filings moving the bulk of the distance) and the end result is that some of the gravitational energy in the bar magnet is transferred to the filings.

I think this only seems like a tricky question with an informal idea of what "energy" is. It doesn't have the same interpretation problem as what the linked article is about.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#47

Post by lacker »

geijoenr wrote: post #5

For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will take a modern day Copernicus to come up w…

It will take a modern day Copernicus

We might already have a modern day Copernicus. Could be string theory, could be something else. The problem is that we don't really have any experimental data that can't be explained by the Standard Model. What we really need is a modern day Galileo that can perform some sort of observations, like finding Jupiter's moons, that don't fit in with the existing conventional physics.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#48

Post by donutdan4114 »

Does anything think Wolfram Theory is going to end up being the right approach to go deeper down the rabbit hole? Personally I think the theory is really interesting and intuitively feels like the universe at some core level may work as the theory suggests. But I’m not sure if many people are considering the theory to have serious promise in the long term.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#49

Post by dekhn »

alar44 wrote: post #41
dekhn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a quote ascribed to Rutherford ("all science is physics or just stamp collecting"). I also heard it when studying protein structures in the 90s (the idea being, if you're just a crystallographer cranking out more structures, you're doing stamp collecting; the real reason to determine structures is to elucidate the general principles of protein folding and function). Note that protein structure prediction finally…

We absolutely understand protein folding. The fact there isn't a closed form simple solution to tell us the shape of a protein shouldn't be surprising at all. It's just hard to calculate. It's like the 3 body problem, but there are 90. I don't know why you think there would be some simple solution to that that doesn't involve simulation and heavy computation. You'd need 8 dimensional 100x100 matrices or something to…

We do not understand protein folding. I'm an expert in this field with publications and what you just said makes no sense at all.

The simplified protein folding problem states that proteins fold to their energy minimum, and a succesful heuristic can find the "correct" fold by finding the structure argmin(energy). Although this is a real simplification that doesn't represent actual proteins, even that is not something you'd solve with matrices; combinatorial math.

More importantly, "protein folding" is the biophysical process that proteins experience; what DeepMind did was solve "structure prediction", which is another simpler problem, and they didn't do it by energy minimization, they did it by exploiting sequence similarity to provide structural constraints that massively reduced the search space.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#50

Post by xyzzyz »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #40
8bitsrule wrote: post #28

Even on the macro level there are lots of tricky questions. A bar magnet is surrounded by magnetic flux lines. Apparently it takes no energy to maintain that magnetic field. If I heat the bar in boiling water for long enough, it becomes demagnetized. On the macro level there's no visible/measureable change in the bar. We need a lot of magnification to see that the 'particles are no longer aligned'. On the other hand,…

Huh? Iron filings fly up because of the principle of minimum potential energy. They can lose potential energy by moving closer to the magnet, so they do. No energy is gained - potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, then heat when they hit the magnet.

Your answer is basically a tautology: if we observe work being performed, there must be some potential energy being converted, that’s what the potential energy is; the ability to perform work. The real question rather is: why doesn’t the same thing happen when I get a stick close to wood shavings? How is energy stored in a magnet in a way that is not stored in a stick?
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