It’s advice: if you wish to be engaged, you can’t say “I’m not a physicist but I figured out what they all get wrong about this whole ‘QM is weird’ thing. It’s really quite simple…”

Nobody will take that claim seriously, or at least nobody who knows enough to carry on a conversation about any of this.

Anyway, you get my point or you don’t. I’ll leave the poor equine corpse alone.

Where you also made it about me.

But I have given the advice, taking it is up to you.

Not humility with respect to me.

With respect to professional physicists (and philosophers).

Again, then: you would be advised to approach subjects where you are not an expert with curiosity and a smidge of humility when you think they are doing something wrong. Your reflex should be to assume that you are missing something, not that they are.

How can you not know that a particle’s location is also used in these thought experiments? Have you never even considered the two slit experiment? It’s like telling me “it’s always cows we make perfectly spherical, you can’t give an example with sheep!”

It’s weird how more words indicate less to say.

I was hoping to show you how implausible it would be for a curious amateur to understand physics better than the experts. Obviously I don’t. Neither do you. So you should probably stop saying that physicists are wrong about the weirdness, really QM works just like regular mechanics if only people would listen to you.

I was responding to this part of the article:

““What if the world isn’t made of well-defined, independent pieces of ‘stuff’?” I hear you say. “Then can we avoid this spooky action?”

Yes, we can. And many in the quantum physics community think this way, too. But this would be no consolation to Einstein.

Einstein had a long-running debate with his friend Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, about this very question. Bohr argued we should indeed give up the idea of the stuff of the world being well defined, so we can avoid spooky action-at-a-distance. In Bohr’s view, the world doesn’t have definite properties unless we’re looking at it. When we’re not looking, Bohr thought, the world as we know it isn’t really there.”

You are not required to discuss that at all.

I have a separate unrelated question, which I should probably put off but I need help:

I happen to know a way physicists could measure momentum of a certain kind of particle much more accurately. I just want to get it out there, I know I won’t make any money, but I’m getting frustrated as hell. Do you have any ideas? Do you know who to ask for ideas?

Hmmm, I see a relatively simple disagreement, and a more serious one.

Simple one: the interpretation are weird in their own ways. It’s possible that “my” interpretation happens not to work for you. But let me test that:

When we measure the location of particle A, we get a particular result. Do you believe in counterfactuals? That if we measure particle B instead, particle A is in that same location it would have we measured it? Feel to answer for either entangled particles or unentangled particles, whichever seems clearest to you.

I think I can guess your answer, but I would rather just ask you yourself!

I am not a physicist. But I have encountered this issue and spent a lot of time on it. Any actual physicist out there is invited to review this and correct it.

Here’s the subtle, insane thing that physicists (and philosophers) have grappled with: what you gave was a perfectly normal description that should apply to both QM and classical physics. “We don’t know where something is until we measure it, but it is somewhere, waiting for us to spot it.” QM is not that normal. It is not just telling us how much information we have, it tells us something weird is going on.

There are competing ways to describe the problem, but a Copenhagen interpretation would say that the wave function of a quantum system evolves smoothly (like ripples on he surface of a pond) then collapses when measured. It’s as if Nature waits to decide where a particle is until we ask.

What difference does that make? Well, I want to emphasize the following point: it took decades for someone to come up with an answer to that. We now know how to conduct an experiment that would give a different outcome if QM’s weird math is right. What I think you said is almost true, almost; quantum measurement almost gives us the same results as if our measurement just tells us where the particle was all along. And for decades many physicists assumed we never would spot any difference, that this apparent weirdness was “just philosophy.”

But Bell showed that we can check if that “almost” is true. Einstein didn’t figure out how to, he didn’t live long enough for anyone to figure this out. Many of the people who first discussed this had passed away. I can’t emphasize enough that it wasn’t obvious we would ever find that QM’s weird methodology made a detectable difference. But Bell came up with his Inequalities, experimenters could finally test for them, and it turned QM’s math was right. Entangled particles measured in a clever way were correlated “too well.”

One of the reasons this gets confusing is that there are many very different descriptions of the weirdness, because if physics says the world works in an impossible way you can “fix the problem” if you are willing to break a different rule instead. I say two entangled particles can’t know how to correlate in advance. But maybe the information travels backwards in time. Or maybe particles actually follow every possible path, but follow each one in a parallel universe. We end up with a lot of very smart people arguing about which unreasonable option is more reasonable. But nobody has found what most other physicists would consider a solution. Something weird really is going on.

I think Nobel Prize was awarded to three people who made a series of cleverer and more conclusive experiments testing Bell’s Inequalities. I think at least two have said that they thought if they were careful enough they could show that QM isn’t really weird in this way. But they kept coming up with the results QM predicted all along.