anti-realism
as well as being a useful introduction to quantum physics, this is an interesting new york times magazine article from the point of view of the apparent fundamental incompatibility of traditional religion and quantum physics, or science more generally.
for quantum physicists it is possible to believe that human beings (are) (...) in essence responsible for conjuring the reality we experience out of a murky netherworld that quantum mechanics implies is simply unknowable. they are the antirealists (...) who believe that physics can only describe the human experience of reality, and that quantum theory’s paradoxes result from misguided attempts to use it to discern the nature of reality itself.
but for someone who believes in an omnipotent supernatural creator this is unacceptable, even if they are a quantum physicist, as is the main character in this story, because he believes in a unity that gives rise to everything therefore everything must be knowable and/or understandable, at least by god.
Although physicists use quantum mechanics to predict the behavior of the fundamental particles, like electrons, that make up atoms and the photons that make up light, and in spite of its having been the basis of many of the 20th century’s signature technologies (including nuclear power, lasers and computers), the theory has confounded even the cognoscenti from its beginnings in the 1920s. That’s because, while it’s spectacular at making predictions, it doesn’t describe what’s actually happening underneath nature’s hood to make those results come about. It would be one thing to concede that science may never be able to explain, say, the subjective experiences of the human mind. But the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in.
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Of course, much about quantum mechanics can be said with words. Like the fact that a particle’s future whereabouts can’t be specified by the theory, only predicted with probabilities. And that those probabilities derive from each particle’s “wave function,” a set of numbers that varies over time, as per an equation devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1925. But because the wave function’s numbers have no obvious meaning, the theory only predicts what scientists may see at the instant of observation — when all the wave function’s latent possibilities appear to collapse to one definitive outcome — and provides no narrative at all for what particles actually do before or after that, or even how much the word “particle” is apropos to the unobserved world. The theory, in fact, suggests that particles, while they’re not being observed, behave more like waves — a fact called “wave-particle duality” that’s related to how all those latent possibilities seem to indicate that an unobserved particle can exist in several places at once. The act of observation itself is then posited to somehow convert this nonsensical situation into the world we see, of objects having definite locations and other properties. This makes human beings, who are after all the ones making the observations, in essence responsible for conjuring the reality we experience out of a murky netherworld that quantum mechanics implies is simply unknowable.