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ovoleg
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What do you guys think??
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Tim Folger
A skeptical physicist charges that his field has been wandering in a philosophical wilderness for 80 years. The good news: He thinks he knows the way out.
Antony Valentini has never been happy with quantum mechanics. Sure, it's the most powerful and accurate scientific theory ever devised. Yes, its bizarre predictions about the behavior of atoms and all other particles have been confirmed many times over with multi-decimal-place exactitude. True, technologies derived from quantum mechanics may account for 30% of the gross national product of the United States. So what's not to like?
Valentini, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London (ICL) and the co-author of a forthcoming book on the early history of quantum mechanics, believes that shortly after the theory's birth some 80 years ago, a cadre of influential scientists led quantum physics down a philosophical blind alley. As a result of that wrong turn, Valentini says, the field wound up burdened with paradoxical dualities, inexplicable long-distance connections between particles, and a pragmatic "shut up and calculate" mentality that stifled attempts to probe what it all means. But there is an alternative, Valentini says: a long-abandoned "road not taken" that could get physics back on track. And unlike other proposed remedies to quantum weirdness, he adds, there's a possible experiment to test whether this one is right.
"There isn't a more insightful or knowledgeable critic in the whole field of quantum theory," says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Smolin, who researches a subfield known as quantum gravity, has long held that current quantum theory is incomplete at best.
---------
Tim Folger
A skeptical physicist charges that his field has been wandering in a philosophical wilderness for 80 years. The good news: He thinks he knows the way out.
Antony Valentini has never been happy with quantum mechanics. Sure, it's the most powerful and accurate scientific theory ever devised. Yes, its bizarre predictions about the behavior of atoms and all other particles have been confirmed many times over with multi-decimal-place exactitude. True, technologies derived from quantum mechanics may account for 30% of the gross national product of the United States. So what's not to like?
Valentini, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London (ICL) and the co-author of a forthcoming book on the early history of quantum mechanics, believes that shortly after the theory's birth some 80 years ago, a cadre of influential scientists led quantum physics down a philosophical blind alley. As a result of that wrong turn, Valentini says, the field wound up burdened with paradoxical dualities, inexplicable long-distance connections between particles, and a pragmatic "shut up and calculate" mentality that stifled attempts to probe what it all means. But there is an alternative, Valentini says: a long-abandoned "road not taken" that could get physics back on track. And unlike other proposed remedies to quantum weirdness, he adds, there's a possible experiment to test whether this one is right.
"There isn't a more insightful or knowledgeable critic in the whole field of quantum theory," says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Smolin, who researches a subfield known as quantum gravity, has long held that current quantum theory is incomplete at best.
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