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I agree that it needs better understanding, but to produce this understand would likely still require "fixing" it. As it stands, QM is a bunch of algebra that "works" for unspecified reasons when using some handwavey heuristics for converting CM to QM. It produces a miscellaneous set of implications, not all of which are clearly connected to each other. Fundamentally, QM is just some special subset of algebra with certain properties. Just like other algebras aren't "physics", QM isn't really physics. It's just a bag of tools with the right algebraic features to solve a wide category of problems physicists often have. This is fine, but first think of ordinary algebra. It has some interesting implications that took a while for people to wrap their head around. The zero wasn't a widely accepted concept for thousands of years. Negative numbers are already a squirrelly concept. How can you have negative three apples? That was an easy abstraction hurdle to get across, eventually, and now even children understand that the implication of this is that you owe three apples. If you're give five apples, you have to return three to whomever you borrowed apples from, and now you're left with two. QM is firmly in the group of abstractions where we haven't worked out the mental models quite yet. Talking about complex-valued probabilities makes most people raise their eyebrows quizzically. It doesn't matter how many different ways you demonstrate that the algebra works out, it's still a very difficult concept to internalise. One interesting mental model I've come across is that classical probabilities are the products of two things, we just haven't noticed. Quantum Mechanics undoes this multiplication, making it in some sense the "square root of classical probabilities", which is not a probability, but something... "else". It's mysterious because in ordinary life we only ever observe the (else×else) products, never the "roots", even though the latter is more fundamental. I've never heard anyone take this kind of thought all the way to its conclusion. My current extremely tentative notion is that the "roots" represent probabilities in a kind of continuous alternate universe space, along the lines of MWI. Neither the "observer" nor the "observed" are in any one such universe, but smeared across them in some distribution. Their interactions require their many-worlds-distributions to be multiplied to produce a "real" result, which is still a distribution, but now the one we're used to in CM. Self-interactions such as a resonator in a potential well require self×self products, which are simplify to self^2. Quantum mechanics just undoes this squaring in order to model to underlying behaviour across parallel worlds. But note how to get even this far, this tentative explanation already required a nearly complete rethinking of what QM really is. It's never going to be sufficient to shuffle the algebra around on a page, because algebra isn't physics. Physics is. Quantum Mechanics is still in the "a bunch of algebraic tricks" stage and needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into a form that people can intuitively understand in terms of physical concepts, not just mathematical ones. |
Some physicists claim it's inevitable because we don't have direct sensory access to quintessential quantum behavior -- we can only have intuitive models for classical physics. I don't buy it -- the human imagination is quite powerful.
I suspect that a superior theory (1) will be mathematically equivalent to QM (2) may suggest obvious extensions that are not equivalent, leading to testable predictions (3) won't result from merely reshuffling equations -- it'll take some serious inspiration.
Another hunch: the decoherence approach is barking up the wrong tree. The lesson of Schroedinger's cat is that realism doesn't emerge from a non-realistic theory. It seems like locality has a better chance of being an emergent property.