Free Republic

There’s one interpretation of the meaning of quantum mechanics that manages to skip a lot of the unphysical weirdness of the mainstream interpretations: it's de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory. There are some pretty out-there explanations for the processes at work behind the incredibly successful mathematics of quantum mechanics - things are both waves and particles at the same time, the act of observation defines reality, cats are alive and dead, or even: the universe is constantly splitting into infinite alternate realities. The weird results of quantum experiments seem to demand weird explanations of the nature of reality. In this episode,...

An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe. Of the many counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, perhaps the most challenging to our notions of common sense is that particles do not have locations until they are observed. This is exactly what the standard view of quantum mechanics, often called the Copenhagen interpretation, asks us to believe. Instead of the clear-cut positions and movements of Newtonian physics, we have a cloud of probabilities described by a mathematical structure known as a...

With its ideas of particles zipping in and out of existence, quantum mechanics is probably the kookiest-sounding theory in science. And our understanding of it is little helped by the mysterious "probability fields" most physicists say dictate the zipping. But a more intuitive picture may lie beneath. As new research demonstrates, beneath the shroud of probability, particles can in fact be viewed as behaving like billiard balls rolling along a table - although in surreal fashion. The result helps resurrect an 80-year-old picture of quantum mechanics, and provides one of the most stirring demonstrations yet of an effect Einstein called...

Owen Maroney worries that physicists have spent the better part of a century engaging in fraud. Ever since they invented quantum theory in the early 1900s, explains Maroney, who is himself a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, they have been talking about how strange it is — how it allows particles and atoms to move in many directions at once, for example, or to spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. But talk is not proof, says Maroney. “If we tell the public that quantum theory is weird, we better go out and test that's actually true,” he says. “Otherwise...