How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics
Quantum mechanics isn’t rocket science. But it’s well on the way to take the place of rocket science as the go-to metaphor for unintelligible math. Quantum mechanics, you have certainly heard, is infamously difficult to understand. It defies intuition. It makes no sense. Popular science accounts inevitably refer to it as “strange,” “weird,” “mind-boggling,” or all of the above.
We beg to differ. Quantum mechanics is perfectly comprehensible. It’s just that physicists abandoned the only way to make sense of it half a century ago. Fast forward to today and progress in the foundations of physics has all but stalled. The big questions that were open then are still open today. We still don’t know what dark matter is, we still have not resolved the disagreement between Einstein’s theory of gravity and the standard model of particle physics, and we still do not understand how measurements work in quantum mechanics.
How can we overcome this crisis? We think it’s about time to revisit a long-forgotten solution, Superdeterminism, the idea that no two places in the universe are truly independent of each other. This solution gives us a physical understanding of quantum measurements, and promises to improve quantum theory. Revising quantum theory would be a game changer for physicists’ efforts to solve the other problems in their discipline and to find novel applications of quantum technology.
Quantum Mechanics Is Everywhere
Until now, physicists and philosophers likewise took it for granted that it’s not quantum mechanics which has shortcomings, but our understanding of it. For this reason, their efforts to make sense of it have focused on reinterpreting its mathematics, hoping that things will click into place eventually. This has not happened and it’s not going to happen. That’s because the problem with quantum mechanics is not one of interpretation. The problem is that all existing
