Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

I'm reticent of falling into this endless conversation again, but it's a bit addictive.

I believe the point is that the Standard Model is still built on Quantum Field Theory, but looking into what's really going on under quantum mechanics is a bit taboo and very few people are spending time on it.

Frankly, I acknowledge that I am an outsider and that surely my perspective is far too naive and simplistic, I'm sure the reality in the field is far more nuanced. But still, I'm in good company when I question what's going on, like Einstein and many other prominent physicists have.

It is true that the end of the conversation was just "shut up and calculate", which is wise on some level, but it also implies that the mathematical model is the end-truth and you should unquestionably just build on it. There is a consensus that the mathematical model of quantum theory is really what is mechanistically happening, and that the wave function is a real physical thing.

But one can also argue that it is merely a probabilistic theory that, yes, describes the probability distributions of what will happen extremely accurately, but still is a partial answer and it doesn't actually predict what will happen. In every other context, we use probability to describe processes that we don't have a complete model for. It is a bit presumptuous to think that in quantum mechanics probabilities are somehow fundamental and not emerging from more deterministic underlying phenomena.

You can have a theory that says that there's an equal likelyhood of getting heads or tails on a coin, and that theory can reflect the statistics extremely accurately. But that is obviously not the end of the story, there are deeper mechanics determining if you get heads or tails at each given time, it is not fundamentally random, you just don't fully understand what's going on yet.

This is false, not his research dissertation at all, ... during his student years he did consider the design of a luminiferous ether experiment that he then believed would differentiate an ether world vs a non-ether world.

Of course his views (and most everyone elses) evolved when Lorentz derived the Lorentz transform on grounds of a physical argument, and pointed out that Maxwell's Equations were maintained their form after such a coordinate transform, in gravity-free universes (simple linearly related inertial systems).

When Einstein developed his special theory of relativity, he rejected the putative measurability of the ether in flat spacetime metrics.

Because the ether does exist, when considering the wider world of non-flat spacetime metrics.

You could say Michelson-Morley compared 2 horizontal axes (which are rotation symmetric with the gravity vector). Variations of predictable ether effects are perfectly measurable, when comparing horizontal with vertical paths!

But the real litmus test is and always has been "can a theory predict the results of empirical measurements (such as controlled experiments) more accurately than its competitors".

The Danish-interpretation quantum physicists might urge you to shut up and calculate, but what we lack is any model capable of both describing why and how the wave function collapses and simultaneously offering more accurate predictions than QM does. The most well known low hanging fruit being: describing events in noticeably curved spacetime (or put in other words, in situations where the effects of gravity are non-trivial) because we don't even need a better model to know that QM breaks there, QM itself will happily tell us that much by piling on infinities and singularities that can no longer be canceled via renormalization.

So the take home is less "shut up and calculate" and more "don't waste their time with speculation about underlying mechanics until it can also offer more accurate predictions, and until then redirect your energies back to calculating: making use out of the tool we already have at least".

If nothing else, familiarity with the tool that does work up to a certain standard is more likely to lead someone to the next big step than hanging back in the wings of Newton and Aristotle with layperson intuitions about macroscopic objects in terrestrial gravity.

This is a ridiculous strawman argument that misconstrues what people are saying is good about science--that it constantly reexamines and improves upon its models. You're saying that it would be preferable to have an oracle that flawlessly tells us the truth, and therefore the fallibility of science is "a weakness of the process", but that's completely absurd, a radical failure of reasoning, as of course no such oracle is possible. Given the inherent limitations of finding empirical facts, and empirical generalizations that only hold because we live in a lawful universe (so far, and everywhere we've looked--it is of course logically possible for it to be otherwise, as Hume noted), science is a very effective and powerful method, the best method conceived.

I won't engage further with such bad reasoning and arguments that verge on bad faith.

> I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.

Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.