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Pseudo-problems
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With regard to the problem of making physical sense of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, the physics community appears to be divided into three factions.
- The first advocates agnosticism. It asserts that the quantum world cannot be described; its features are forever beyond our ken. All we can usefully talk about is statistical correlations between measurement outcomes.
- The second faction aspires to describe the quantum world without reference to measurements.
This faction is split into numerous warring sects. Here is how Chris Fuchs describes the situation:
"Go to any meeting devoted to some aspect of the quantum foundations, and it is like being in a holy city in great tumult. You will find all the religions with all their priests pitted in holy war—the Bohmians, the Consistent Historians, the Transactionalists, the Spontaneous Collapseans, the Einselectionists, the Contextual Objectivists, the outright Everettics, and many more beyond that... They all declare to see the light, the ultimate light..."
- The third faction — arguably the majority — is tired of this spectacle and does not care what (if anything) quantum mechanics is trying to tell us about the nature of Nature.
The agnostics have a point in that nothing of relevance can be said without reference to measurements. Yet they are wrong when they assert that the features of the quantum world are beyond our ken. As we have seen, a great deal can be learned by analyzing the quantum-mechanical probability assignments in various experimental contexts.
The priests, too, have a point: it is indeed possible to describe the features of the quantum world. Yet they are wrong when they insist that these features ought to be described without reference to measurements.
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