Quantum wonders: Nobody understands
It is tempting, faced with the full-frontal assault of quantum weirdness, to trot out the notorious quote from Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
It does have a ring of truth to it, though. The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.
With its uncertainty principles and measurement paradoxes, the Copenhagen interpretation amounts to an admission that, as classical beasts, we are ill-equipped to see underlying quantum reality. Any attempt we make to engage with it reduces it to a shallow classical projection of its full quantum richness.
Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University, Israel, like many other physicists, touts an alternative explanation. “I don’t feel that I don’t understand quantum mechanics,” he says. But there is a high price to be paid for that understanding – admitting the existence of parallel universes.
In this picture, wave functions do not “collapse” to classical certainty every time you measure them; reality merely splits into as many parallel worlds as there are measurement possibilities. One of these carries you and the reality you live in away with it. “If you don’t admit many-worlds, there is no way to have a coherent picture,” says Vaidman.
Or, in the words of Feynman again, whether it is the Copenhagen interpretation or many-worlds you accept, “the ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be”.
Being a musician, I have to wonder if this parallel universe thing, with a new universe sprouting up to contain each contingency that “could” have happened but “didn’t” in our universe, means that for every wrong note in a jazz improvisation there is some universe where it’s the right note.
At various times in my life, I think I’ve created a LOT of universes.
May 9th, 2010 10:42 pm
And I hear those universes don’t pay jazz musicians any better either!
May 10th, 2010 7:22 am
Maybe the wrong notes we play are really just right notes from another dimension that slipped through into ours!
May 10th, 2010 8:30 am
I don’t think you guys are taking this alternate universe things seriously enough. It could explain a lot. I think I slipped between two of them somewhere around the age of 15. Maybe 14. Maybe both. In fact, I find myself wondering what you guys were like in the universe I started out from. I’ll bet Dave was a viola player…. and Sam, you sold vacuum cleaners.
Anyway, Dave, the proper understanding is they pay jazz musicians too much in some universes, and not enough in others. You decide which type you’re in.
May 10th, 2010 8:10 pm
OK, I don’t know much…but I do know there is no such thing as a universe where jazz musicians are paid too much. That’s about as likely as canals on Mars
May 10th, 2010 8:34 pm
In at least one universe, the Martians attack the Earth on giant three legged “earth rovers” that suck people up in a giant vacuum cleaner and bleed them dry.
Oh, wait… that’s the Democrat tax policy. Sorry, got confused there for a moment.
May 11th, 2010 12:15 pm
Perfectly understandable.
May 11th, 2010 10:30 pm
I didn’t think there were any wrong notes in Jazz 🙂 (Just kidding of course)
May 12th, 2010 11:05 am
I could have made a comment that contributed to this discussion, but will leave it for another universe.