Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

by Nick Herbert

It did not occur to me to wonder why Heisenberg quickly abandoned such an obvious explanation to take up the more obscure and mystical Copenhagen interpretation, which most physicists endorse today.

In brief, the Copenhagen interpretation holds that in a certain sense the unmeasured atom is not real: its attributes are created or realized in the act of measurement.

Bell’s theorem is easy to understand but hard to believe. This theorem says that reality must be non-local.

According to John Bell, the act of measurement is not a private act, but a public event in whose details large portions of the universe instantly participate.

Bell’s theorem has immensely clarified the quantum reality question. For instance we now know for certain that no local model (such as my naïve disturbance model) can explain the quantum facts.

the heart of science is a kind of shrewd honesty that springs from really wanting to know what the hell is going on! Saul-Paul Sirag

Bell’s theorem is one of the clearest windows that physicists possess into the nature of deep reality.

with only three mathematical laws Newton could explain all motion in heaven and on Earth.

“the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

“is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

Reality (Kant called it the “thing-in-itself”) is what lies behind all phenomena.

Kant believed that the world’s appearances were deeply conditioned by human sensory and intellectual apparatus.

see the world through particularly human goggles.

Kant, because both facts and concepts have a common origin—the human condition. Insofar as human nature is entwined with the appearances, human concepts will be successful in explaining those appearances.

Man is fated to know, either directly or through conceptualization, merely the world’s appearances and of these appearances only that part which is of human origin.

concerned mainly with survival and reproduction of humankind. The powers that such clever animals may possess are wholly inadequate to picture reality itself, which belongs to an order that utterly transcends our domestic concerns.

reality researchers of an optimistic bent argue that since humans are part of nature, deeply natural to the core, nothing prevents us from experiencing or conceptualizing reality itself. Indeed some of our experiences and/or some of our ideas may already be making contact with rock-bottom reality.

optimism/pe...

the pragmatist/realist...

A pragmatist believes only in facts and mathematics and refuses in principle to speculate concerning deep reality, such questions bei...

“The final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our kn...

The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulas and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from, reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit.”

A realist, on the other hand, believes that a good theory explains the facts because it makes contact with a reality behind those facts. The major purpose of science, according to the realists, is to go beyond both fact and theory to the reality underneath. As Einstein, the most famous realist of them all, put it, “Reality is the real business of physics.”

“between the instincts of prudence and audacity necessary to the slow progress of human science.”

THE LUMINIFEROUS ETHER

Maxwell conjectured that light, in reality, was an electromagnetic vibration at a particular frequency.

The cornerstone of Einstein’s theory was that only relative motions were of any consequence for the basic laws of physics. According to Einstein, there is no physical means by which one can observe a body’s absolute motion through space.

two observers in relative motion measuring the positions and times of the same events would get different results.

famous E = mc2 relation, which predicts that an object’s mass is equivalent to a certain amount of energy, with an enormous conversion factor—the square of the speed of light.

Einstein’s major insight, the key to relativity theory, is that all valid physical laws must be built from these absolute quantities alone. Only in this way can these laws be made the same for all observers.

One of Einstein’s absolutes is the speed of light: it is the same for an observer on Mars as an observer on Earth.

Another Einsteinian absolute is the so-called space-time interval. Although space and time by themselves are different for each observer, a certain mathematical combination of space and time, chosen so that changes in ...

Relativity’s intimate linkage of space and time in the invariant space-time interval gives rise to the notion that in reality the world is four-dimensional—consisting of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. The space-time i...

According to Einstein, only such absolute quantities can be used as the ingredients of a valid physical law. Laws built to Einstein’s specifications are called “covariant.” Today we know for sure that if a physical theory does not have a covariant formulation it cannot represent the facts. By looking at where it’s not covariant—wherever it uses a...

According to Einstein, the physics governing the interaction of bodies A and B can depend only on their relative motion, not on their velocity measured with respect to some special reference frame.

THE ATOMICITY OF MATTER

“By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.”

In 1905, the same year he conceived the theory of relativity which demolished the luminiferous ether, Einstein published a paper on Brownian motion that pointed the way to conclusive experiments bearing on the real existence of atoms.

Einstein showed that although the number of atoms striking the Brownian particle from each direction is equal on the average, the fluctuations away from this average lead to unbalanced forces in random directions. In any random process, the relative fluctuations from an average value is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of samples—the smaller the sample, the bigger the fluctuations. For a large particle, the bulk pressure of the surrounding atoms is indeed evenly balanced, but for a small particle, the fluctuations in the number of impinging atoms is sufficient to propel it in an unpredictable direction with a predictable force. Einstein showed how this random force would vary with temperature and particle size. If atoms existed, Einstein’s model of Brownian motion would allow you actually to count the number of atoms striking a Brownian particle by measuring how far it drifts in response to these fluctuation forces.

Quantum theory has been universally successful in describing phenomena at all levels accessible to experiment. It’s a perfect cookbook, for whatever we choose to cook up. However, this comprehensive practical success has been accompanied by an unprecedented disagreement as to what quantum theory actually means, and a corresponding confusion as to what sort of reality supports the phenomenal world. In the next chapter I examine some of the contradictory quantum realities which different physicists claim to be the “real reality” that lies behind the external appearances of this world we live in.

One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality.

Niels Bohr,

that there is no deep reality. Bohr does not deny the evidence of his senses. The world we see around us is real enough, he affirms, but it floats on a world that is not as real. Everyday phenomena are themselves built not out of phenomena but out of an utterly different kind of being.

“There is no deep reality” represents the prevailing doctrine of e...

Bohr insisted: “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description.”

Werner Heisenberg,

“The hope that new experiments will lead us back to objective events in time and space is about as well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic.”

The Copenhagen interpretation properly consists of two distinct parts: 1. There is no reality in the absence of observation; 2. Observation creates reality. “You create your own reality,” is the theme of Fred Wolf’s Taking the Quantum Leap.

“In this philosophy I found comfort for a time … There was a curious pleasure in making oneself believe that time and space are unreal, that matter is an illusion and that the world really consists of nothing but mind.”

Quantum Reality #3 (Reality is an undivided wholeness.)