Part 5! What is the Copenhagen interpretation? How did the debates between Heisenberg and Schrodinger influence later physicists? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the “shut up and calculate” approach to quantum mechanics? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

Today's episode of Ask a Spaceman is brought to you by chirp. Chirp is an audio book retailer known for amazing deals without any commitments or subscription, and I've started an audio book club with them. You know, you're always asking me for book recommendations. Well, here it is, folks. This month I'm recommending Alien Oceans By Kevin Hand. It is perhaps the most glorious irony in all of astronomy. The best place to find liquid water is in the frozen moons of the outer solar system Europa, Enceladus and more host oceans faster than the Earths. And where there's water, there's a chance for life. Alien oceans is the deep dive unintended you need into strange worlds in our own backyard. Here's what you do. You go join, go to chirp books dot com slash spaceman and grab my next pick, Alien Oceans, which is on sale for $4.99. I wasn't kidding about the amazing deals. And be sure to press follow to join my club and stay in the loop on future picks and other exclusive content that's chirp.

Books dot com slash spaceman. Thank you for your support for those of you just tuning in. We are now in part five of our adventures into the subatomic realm. And to be perfectly honest, we've come a long way. I'm very proud of you for making it this far. We've learned the basics of quantum theory as understood by physicists. We've learned the place that quantum mechanics has in physics as a larger expression of human curiosity. And we've met some of the cast of characters who, at the turn of the 20th century, developed quantum mechanics out of whole cloth and as a complete departure from everything that came before it, including everything that they had been taught and had been working on. Up until that time, it really was a revolution. And we've explored some just some of the implications of what that quantum mechanical revolution has taught us about reality.

We've only just tasted the debates around the topic, and now, my friends, it's time to gorge ourselves on it. Because that question, what does quantum mechanics teach us about reality will become the question following the quantum revolution and remains the question even today. But let's rewind a bit. Let's go back to that revolution that we talked about a couple of episodes ago and where we saw how Heisenberg and Schroedinger and other characters were were creating this theory of quantum mechanics in the 19 twenties. And it really was a revolution. It happened quick. It happened violently. There were tears. There was blood. There was grief and strife. It was a revolution. Like most revolutions, it was messy. And like most revolutions, it it involved a lot of big personalities by which I mean giant egos. One of the fascinating slash funniest parts of this whole saga during this quantum revolution was how much the principal characters involved in the very development of quantum mechanics pretty much despised a each other.

That's a given and B the very theory that they were in the process of developing. That's right. Most of the people working on quantum mechanics didn't like the results that they were getting, not even their own. And they certainly didn't like the results that other people were getting. And they argued extensively and exhaustively with each other about the meaning of quantum mechanics and one of the central questions. And this will be the question that we will return to again and again and again throughout the rest of this series is what is real, what is real. We've learned some of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, Uh, that that is a fact of life. We've learned about things like the wave function or the wave nature of matter. We've learned about entanglement. We've learned about the process of measurement. We've learned about the nature of of collapse, whatever that means. We've learned about uncertainties.

We've learned about probabilities. These seem to be facts of life, of quantum mechanics. And yet we don't know what's real. What is just a symptom that perhaps quantum mechanics is incomplete or is a genuine aspect of our material existence in the universe? This is the question. And when it comes to this question, you have Schrodinger developing his famous cat in a box thought experiment to show how ridiculous quantum theory was. We'll we'll get to that later. In a different episode, you have episodes of bore Neil's bore calling everyone an idiot, and then you have people like Einstein who got the whole quantum thing started. And then a couple days get decades later, throwing up their hands, saying, You're all a bunch of Looney Tunes and I'm out. It's a mad house. It's like all these classical musicians getting together to invent death metal, but then disagreeing about what death metal really is. And if we should even be doing death metal anymore, and if it's even music or or if there's a a better music and death, metal is just a a AAA thin veneer of creating music.

And there's something more fundamental underneath in this line of thinking of self doubt. The early 20th century is probably the peak period in physics, where physics itself as a discipline of science and philosophy, doubts itself the most. And I don't think we've gotten out of that. I really think physics is in the middle of an existential crisis that's lasted over a century. It started with Plank Max Plank 18 99. He's like, Hey, I'm trying to explain black body radiation. This this weird radiation of this these experiments, he came up with the idea that maybe the emission of radiation is quantized. Maybe the emission of radiation comes in little chunks. I don't know. It's just a guess. He thought it was just a guess. It was just a hack that made the math work. He wasn't even sure it was right. He thought something more fundamental will surely come along to explain all this. Meanwhile, we have this ugly math that I guess works. We're still waiting for something better to come along.

We continue with Einstein. Einstein took Max Plank's idea that maybe the emission of radiation as quantized comes in little chunks. Einstein said, maybe light itself comes in little chunks. The photon. He was a strong advocate and champion for that idea, and he was used to being a radical thinker. So this didn't bother him much, but nobody else liked it. Everyone else just thought it was a convenient mathematical trick. It wasn't something real. That light wasn't really particles. Einstein. You're just kidding us. Put the chalk down. We get it, it jokes over. And they had good reason to believe that the particle theory of light didn't work because the wave theory of light was enormously successful and it was hard to reconcile the two. And then speaking of waves, you have, uh, de bro's hypothesis about matter waves where he's like, yeah, you know, light is wavy and kind of particle. Matter is particle Maybe it's also kind of wavy, you know, if that idea didn't have Einstein himself backing it, it would have just been thrown in the trash.

You would have never heard about de Broy because people would have looked at that idea and said, No, absolutely not. Fail. You did not get your PhD. But Einstein backed the idea. And so people were forced to listen to it because Einstein was so gigantic. Keep in mind, plank, Einstein, deRoy And just about everyone we've already met in the development of quantum mechanics will win Nobel Prizes for their work, even though they weren't really fans of their own work. Why? Because quantum mechanics was such a huge break from classical physics and as everyone was developing quantum theory. And it was so radically different from classical physics and so non intuitive and made so little sense again, that comparison death metal to classical music. This was so radical everyone, almost everyone, had a sneaking suspicion that they were just making things up on the spot, and in many cases they were. Decades later, Richard Feynman would remark about the work of Schroedinger and Schrodinger's development of the wave equation.

The wave mechanics of quantum mechanics. And he would say, Where did that come from? When you when you read their papers and and their letters, they're just spitballing random crazy ideas like 3 a.m. They bolt up right out of bed and say, You know, I maybe this is right. And then they write it down and, yeah, there were a lot of wrong ideas. A lot. In fact, most of the ideas tossed around in the 19 tens and 19 twenties were absolutely wrong. The history I presented to you is the history of the right ideas, the ones that survived experimental tests and led to a cohesive theory. But people really were just making it up on the spot and not fully understanding what they were grappling with Again, this is obvious if you read the original paper, so much of the original papers is just glossed over or waved away or my favorite, justified by simply stating it to be true. Like, uh OK, so we're gonna say matter has waves, and we're gonna assume that's true.

And then we're gonna move on like Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You don't get to do that. The foundational papers of quantum mechanics would not pass peer review in the 21st century. They would not because they were so sloppy. But I can't blame them because they're literally making up a brand new way of doing physics. And they're just groping around in the dark and spitballing. It would take until the 19 thirties, a decade after the original development of quantum mechanics, to finally clean up the place and put it on firm mathematical grounds. But you would normally expect that once all the math got sorted out and cleaned out and fully proven et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that we would also develop a coherent picture of what all the math meant. And I I told you the math. It was the episode on the postulates of quantum mechanics that is the mathematics of quantum mechanics. That is how we do quantum mechanics. And you would think once you have that math, you also have a picture. After all, we've been down this road before, with other branches of physics coming up with a crazy new idea. Wow, that's really weird.

Einstein's space and time are curved in response to the presence of matter and energy. That's that's wild. But then you get used to it, and you're like, OK, I get it. I can picture that in my head when you get back to work. But quantum mechanics would prove to be such an insane departure from classical physics that immediately, as soon as physicists start developing the full theory in the 19 twenties, they start arguing about what it all meant. They would get the math right. You know, Heisenberg's matrix approach? Uh, Schrodinger's wave approach, other approaches, other developments and all the math would agree with the experiment. So nobody debated if the mathematics itself was correct or incorrect, because either the experiments showed that it was right or not. So nobody argued that, but everyone argued about what these math equations meant. Tensions had been simmering for decades about the wave particle nature of light and matter all through the early 20th century. But it's with Heisenberg and Schroedinger that we get our first glimpse to the arguments about the interpretation of quantum mechanics itself.

The arguments that persist to the present day one of the first arguments to appear over the interpretation of quantum mechanics is whether or not matter waves really exist. And whether we can interpret and and visualize and describe what's happening at subatomic levels. This is our first debate. So we developed the mathematics, Heisenberg's approach, Schrodinger's approach. These give very radically different views of what's going on. Turns out they're compatible. You can do some mathematical games to translate back and forth, which is awesome, but also is really annoying because you can't prove one to be true. Absent of the other, they both have to be correct, so they have to be reconciled. And if you remember, Heisenberg just focused on Observables. In that corner we have Heisenberg and friends like Max Bone and Neil's Boer, who developed Matrix mechanics which just focused on inputs and observables just said, Look, you're gonna run an experiment, you're gonna heat up some hydrogen or whatever, it's gonna glow.

Well, what you care about is what you see. You you get a spectrum of light coming out of that hydrogen. You're gonna take some electrons and and shoot them at something. OK, like the electron is gonna hit something or it's not gonna hit something. Well, let's care about Observables. Let's care about what we get out of our measurements. Let's not try to paint pictures of what's going on because it's subatomic physics. You literally can't see it. And on the other hand, we have people like Schrodinger and friends like Dear Old Uncle Albert with wave mechanics, which focus on on understanding the wave nature of matter and insisting that they are real. Say OK, wave particle duality is a real thing. We see this with light. We believe we have this intuition when it comes to matter. If I look at a bit of matter, it all it's not just a particle, it also has some wavy nature. And I'm going to insist that this is a real thing, an object of study, the same way a chair is real or a gravitational wave is real, or or you and me are real. These waves of matter are real, and I'm going to try to understand them with the power of physics.

These two approaches give radically different views of what's happening at subatomic scales. So as soon as we see quantum mechanics get invented, we see the very creators of the theory beginning to debate the meaning of quantum mechanics. What is important what is real and what is just a tool for achieving experimental results. Here's a quote from Heisenberg in this quote he he's emphasizing that we should focus on what we can observe, and he's saying, Don't try to picture the subatomic world because it's so far out of human experience. Quote. The electron and the atom do not possess any degree of physical reality as objects of daily experience. Investigation of the type of physical reality, which is proper to electrons and atoms, is precisely the subject of atomic physics and thus also of quantum mechanics. He's saying, Listen, you can't imagine what an atom looks like on the inside.

You can't imagine what an electron actually looks like and actually does, because it's so far removed from our normal daily experience. So don't bother instead instead, if you want to understand what's happening, just focus on what you can measure and and guess what. We have a tool. It's called quantum mechanics that helps us determine what measurements are you're gonna get. Singer naturally felt that this was completely wrong, that we should be able to build a picture of the subatomic world. After all, nature is nature and physics is physics. It seems wrong to him to just write down the math like we're missing an actual understanding of the problem. In a letter to Neil's Bore, he described this phenomenon of quantum jumps or quantum leaps and in quantum jumps, quantum leaps. Th this is part of our everyday language. Now we say, OK, there's an electron in an orbital in an atom, and it can jump from one level to another and either absorb or emit radiation.

We're We're just like I just say that, and by now, 100 years later, it's so bland to say, like, Yeah, yeah, the electron jumps from one orbital, tono another. It emits or absorbs radiation, and then we move on with our lives. Here's Schrodinger's response to that statement. You surely must understand bore. And as an aside, isn't that the greatest? When you put someone's last name like he's really like calling Bore an idiot? I love it. You surely must understand bore that the whole idea of quantum jumps necessarily leads to nonsense. The electron jumps from this orbit to another one, and thereby radiates uh, does this transition occur gradually or suddenly? If it occurs gradually, then the electron must gradually change its rotation, frequency and energy. It's not comprehensible how this can give sharp frequencies for spectral lines. But if the transition occurs suddenly in a jump, so to speak, one must ask how the electron moves in a jump.

Why doesn't it emit a continuous spectrum and what laws determine its motion in this jump? In essence, shorting here is saying, Yeah, your theory, even though it produces correct answers, doesn't make intuitive sense or explain how things work like you. OK, you say the electron jumps. How is it jumping? Is it moving from one or to the other? Uh, but that violates experiment. We see these sharp emission lines in spectrum, so we know it is like a very discrete movement. OK, if it's a very discrete movement, tell me how it moves. I'm li. I'm able to point to literally anything else in the universe or and say, Yeah, this is how it moves. But then all of a sudden we get to an electron. You're like, I don't know how it moves. It just does. That's not good physics. On the other hand, Schroedinger thought that the waves in his wave equation were real, he believed, really, in this wave particle duality of nature, where he said, Look, if a particle like an electron has a wave like nature, then that means the electron is literally smeared out over space in the shape of a wave where if you point to an electron, it is not a tiny little point.

It actually occupies a little bit of volume. He thought that this approach, that the wave nature of the electron was real. He thought that this was superior because it gave a picture that we could visualize in our heads as to what was going on. Here's a quote. My theory of matter. Waves was inspired by deRoy and by short but incomplete remarks by Einstein. No genetic relation, whatever with Heisenberg is known to me. I knew of his theory, of course, but felt discouraged, not to say repelled by the methods of transcendental algebra. That's the Matrix equations, which appeared very difficult to me and by the lack of Visualize. He's saying, Yeah, I know about Heisenberg's work, but his math is like weird, and I can't picture what's going on, and if we can't picture what's going on. How can we claim to be physicists? That's why my view of matter waves is superior because I can imagine I can think in my head of what's going on and I can tell you Hey, Schroedinger, what happens inside of an atom?

Schrodinger says. Well, you've got this matter wave and it moves around awesome. Heisenberg couldn't do that, Heisenberg says. I don't know what's happening inside of an atom. Here's a quote from Heisenberg. The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrodinger's theory, the more disgusting I find it, what Schroedinger writes on the visualized ability of his theory, I consider trash. The greatest result of his theory is the calculation of the Matrix elements. He's saying that the only reason that Schrodinger's approach has any value at all is that it ultimately leads to the same answers as Heisenberg's approach. Eisenberg is saying, Yeah, Y. You can visualize what's the point trotting or quit wasting your time. It's an atom, OK, it's not an apple. It's not a ball rolling down a hill. It's not a star exploding. It's an Adam dude. Chill out. Stop trying so hard. Eventually, Schroedinger lost this round in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, he believed that matter really was smeared out over space in the shape of a wave.

But that couldn't reconcile with the fact that we only ever see an entire electron. Because if you if you have an electron that's actually spread out over space, then you can set up certain experiments like a scattering experiment or or or put an electron in a box. And you should be able to see fractions of an electron in certain locations because there's a little bit of that matter wave like leaking out over here. So if you just look over here, you see a little little bit of the electron like the little edge of the electron. But we don't we only ever see the whole electron. And this became very clear when we were doing scattering experiments where we were taking an electron, shooting it at stuff, letting it deflect off that stuff and then hit a screen behind it in order to calculate how the electron behaved as it deflected off of a a screen or a gas or whatever. We needed wave equations. So definitely there was this wave nature of reality was coming in. But then, when the electron hits the screen, it's just it's just an electron.

It's not a smeared out thing. It's just a tiny little point where, in Schroeder's view, if the matter wave was correct, he would get the, uh, deflection of the electron through the material just fine. But then it should also, like smear out on the screen. Instead, we only ever get a point on the screen. And it was these scattering experiments that led to another interpretation of what is a wave of matter. So up until now we've had two. We've had Schroedinger saying. Waves of matter are real. Matter is actually physically extended in space, or a point like particle is actually smeared out in space. You have Heisenberg's approach, which is Shut up, just whatever. Don't try to build a picture. You're wasting your time, and now we have a third interpretation of what is a wave of matter. The matter waves the waves that we associate with matter itself aren't real in the sense of physically extended existing objects, but instead they are waves of probability.

These waves tell you where you might find the electron, the next time you go looking for it when you go looking for it, you will either see an entire electron somewhere or you won't. That's it. But the wave tells you you know where you're more likely to find it and less likely to find it. That is the wave equation or the wave function of Schroedinger, the way function. We call it that because it turns out to take the shape of waves like water waves or sound waves with peaks and valleys. But what it really represents is a is a math expression that captures the essence of a matter way. Then it tells you where you might find an electron the next time you go looking for it, and you can replace Electron with any suitably quantum object. In this description, this show is sponsored by better help. One of the most awesome things about physics is that it's like a user manual for the universe.

You can literally use it to predict the future Now. Now humans are a little bit more complicated. Believe it or not, people are more complicated than quantum physics. I am not joking, and and life and dealing with people does not come with a user manual, and the next best thing is therapy. I have been using therapy for years. It's such a powerful tool for me to to answer life's questions when those questions don't come in the form of of of physics problems. And I think you will benefit a lot from it, too. And that's why I'm proud to have better help as a sponsor. Better help is the world's largest therapy service. Better Help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online. Plus it's affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with the therapist. If things aren't clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist any time. It couldn't be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist to learn more and save 10% off your first month at better help dot com slash spaceman.

That's better. Help HE LP dot com slash spaceman This concept that the waves of matter were waves of probability would cement two things. One that quantum mechanics is nondeterministic, that you shoot your electron at a screen and you don't know where it's gonna land, you can say where it might land. Where has a really good chance of landing at a 10 10.5% chance of landing within this area right over here. But you can't say exactly where that is non deterministic. You don't know the exact precise results that you're gonna get when you fire up your experiment. That's a major break from classical physics, because in classical physics everything was deterministic. Quantum mechanics is not in this probability. Wave encodes that. The other thing that it elevates that it cements is the importance of measurement above the view of just what's going on.

So this is saying, instead of worrying about what the electron is actually doing, what interactions actually take place, how this process actually unfolds When I shoot an electron at a screen or I heat up a hydrogen gas and I see the emission of radiation, it is leaning back on that Heisenberg like approach of saying, Look, don't worry about the details. Don't try to picture what's going on when an electron is moving around or living inside of an atom. Don't try to draw the picture or imagine it. Just focus on what you can measure, because what we measure is more important than what we can visualize. Because subatomic processes are so far removed from our everyday experience, you can't paint a picture of something that's literally impossible to imagine, Wolfgang Polly said. Quote. Don't take it as an unfriendliness to you, but look on the expression as my objective conviction.

That quantum phenomenon naturally display aspects that cannot be expressed by the concepts of continuum that is classical physics. But don't think that this conviction makes life easy for me. I have already tormented myself because of it and will have to do so even more. There's Paul saying, Look, there's gonna be aspects of the subatomic world that we simply can't wrap our minds around and I don't like it, but it's simply the way it is. Nobody likes quantum mechanics. Like I said at the beginning of the series, including the people who invented quantum mechanics, they're tormenting themselves. You know, Schroedinger talking about quantum jumps and saying, Look, this is ridiculous. How does it actually move? Come on, man. Here's bore. Responding Yes, in what you say, you are completely right that quantum jumps don't make any sense. But that doesn't prove that there are no quantum jumps. It only proves that we can't visualize them. That means that the pictorial concepts we use to describe the events of everyday life in the experiments of the old physics do not suffice also to represent the process of a quantum jump.

That is not surprising when one considers that the process with which we are concerned here cannot be the subject of direct experience and our concepts do not apply to them. Yeah, Schrodinger, you're right. I don't know how it jumps. I don't know how this works. I can't visualize it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And we shouldn't keep trying. We'll never be able to imagine what an electron actually does. Think about that. Think of the electrons in your body or or the chair you're sitting in. We don't know how those electrons actually work. You might have a picture in your head. That picture is wrong. And yet it seems that quantum jumps actually do happen. Quantum mechanics actually works. So this line of thinking led to what we now call the Copenhagen interpretation. Because Heisenberg and Neel's Boer were based there although the term didn't apply until the 19 fifties, here's the basics of the Copenhagen interpretation. One in determinism. You don't know what you're gonna get until you actually measure it.

Quantum mechanics is nondeterministic. It's in deterministic. When you go to set up your experiment, you can only describe probabilities of outcomes. You can't say for certain what will happen. Another key part of the Copenhagen interpretation. Correspondence. We live you and me in a fundamentally quantum world, but quantum stuff fuzzes out at the large scale. So the macroscopic world only appears classical. There's this transition from the quantum world to our own world. You know, subatomic physics is quantum, but up here, when I'm shaking your hand, that's very, very classical. I throw a ball at you that's very classical, even though all of it is sitting on top of quantum interactions. Uh, but there's this transition from the quantum world to the classical one, and what we get out of experiments and measurements is classical measurement is a classical thing we do on quantum systems. The last major part of the Copenhagen interpretation is the bone rule developed by Max Bone, the wave function, Schrodinger's matter waves that actually doesn't tell you that matter is smeared out over space.

It tells you about probabilities. It's not real. Instead, it's a mathematical convenience that tells you the probabilities of getting certain results. But it's not an actual physically existing object. And when you take a measurement, the wave function collapses or reduces or projects onto one in many possible states, and that's the result you'll get for all subsequent measurements. This is the collapse of the wave function that you may be familiar with. You have the wave function that tells you everything that could happen, and then you actually take a measurement. The wave function goes away and and you just get a result. You get an electron sticking to a screen the way function went away, and now you just have an electron. This is the majority view of how quantum mechanics works even today, and it's the way it's typically taught in physics classes to new generations of physicists. Uh, now you understand why to put in a couple small caveats when we discuss the postulates of quantum mechanics way back when because that incorporates some of these assumptions and interpretations and any time I've ever spoken about quantum mechanics on this show.

This is the viewpoint I've taken because it's the standard interpretation. Notice again how important measurement is to this whole viewpoint. The Copenhagen interpretation says. We don't know what's really going on inside of Adams, and you know what? Not and it's not important. But when we take a measurement, we get a result, and this is how the quantum world reveals itself and ultimately, what we should care about. We should care about results, Heisenberg said. What we observe is not nature itself, but patreon patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. You can certainly measure and observe that, and your support makes this show happen. I can't thank you enough. Heisenberg actually said. What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. In other words, the Copenhagen interpretation says that we can't can't really know what's going on in quantum systems, but we have a handy list of rules of getting experimental results, and that's not a bad thing because the subatomic world is so far removed from everyday experience. Not everyone was happy.

Even Neil's Boer thought Heisenberg was going a little too far, Heisenberg believed nature itself had limits. Boer thought only our measurements had limits, a very subtle but important distinction, Schroedinger said. Quote. I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it. As the decades go by, the next generation of physicists get trained and they get trained on the Copenhagen interpretation. They get trained on this viewpoint that we shouldn't worry about the details because we can't visualize what's happening. We should just focus on results. Schroedinger gets angrier and angrier as he sees this evolution unfold as UH, Neils bore and Werner Heisenberg and Max Bourne. And people like that start dominating the discussion of physics and dominating the view of physics and how quantum mechanics should be interpreted. And as the years go by, his quotes get like uglier and uglier, he says. Quote, uh, the verbal interpretation that is the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, that is the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than 40 years, physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model. Years later, he says, If we are going to stick to this damned quantum jumping. Then I regretted that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory. And then finally, in one of his last letters, he says Now, the damn gotten physicists use my beautiful wave mechanics. We're calculating that. Oh, wait. This this is gonna be this is gonna be fun for a gotten city in Germany where where a lot of Copenhagen adherents were based, Uh, there's a swear in here and I don't swear on the show because, you know, kids are listening. So I know, uh, Cathy, um, Cathy is my wonderful editor. Cathy, could you insert a a humorous sound in place of the of the swear word? You can choose whatever you want, as long as it's pretty funny. Schroedinger said, quote. Now the damned got and get. Physicists use my beautiful wave mechanics for calculating their matrix elements, at which point Schroedinger exits the stage and spends the rest of his life working on other problems.

I don't blame him for rejecting this interpretation of quantum mechanics because it feels wrong. It feels like we should be able to develop pictures of the subatomic world. We've successfully done it for centuries in every other realm of physics. And yet this is where we stop. Schroedinger wasn't alone in believing this, that quantum mechanics had serious shortcomings, that this interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, had serious shortcomings and that we could do better. His big ally in the fight against quantum gas was none other than Albert Einstein. But Einstein's reaction to the full development of quantum theory needs its own episode next time. Thanks to everyone who have asked questions about quantum mechanics, let's go through the list again. Mihail E on email at Charman on Twitter Massimiliano S on Facebook Isaac Pian email at on Twitter Chris F on Facebook A Be on email at SMTR on Twitter Albert R on email Julius M on email.

Martin EON email John on Facebook RC on email Nick S on email at Jordie R on Twitter at Pizza Larger on Twitter Aras An email. HP Ariana and email Scott M on email. Graeme Deon email MARTIN An on email Sample SAPIENs on Twitter. Peter WE on email Mark Reap on Twitter. Sean on email Susan on email Daniel Jan email Campbell Dion email TIMOTHY be on YouTube Fernando G on email. and James W on email. Thank you, of course, to my top patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Top ones this month. Justin G, Chris L Barbeque, Duncan MD, Justin Zed, Andrew F, NAIA Scott M, Rob H, Justin Lewis M John W, Alexis Aaron J, Jennifer M, Gilbert M, Joshua Bob H, John S, Thomas de Michael R and Simon G. You can join their illustrious ranks by going to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. Keep the questions coming. Ask us spaceman at gmail dot com. Ask us spaceman dot com Find me on all social channels at Paul Matts Sutter, and I'll see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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