Carver Mead weighs down against the statistical basis of quantum mechanics

Frank_Macky

http://laputan.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_archive.html

*VERY* interesting... something to shut Deepak Chopra and all those other new age kooks up, perhaps...?

Frank_Macky

"Mead makes some pretty interesting points about the sorry state of obscurantism that typifies our current interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is something he blames largely on Neils Bohr and the Copenhagen school. Einstein was never happy with the Copenhagen formulation which he thought represented an incomplete understanding of nature at the quantum scale."

"Mead agrees with Einstein and goes on to claim that a lot of the confusion and counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics would go away if we stopped imagining elementary particles like electrons and protons as tiny points and instead saw them as waves with a boundary. Of course it helps to have already had a stellar career in solid-state physics under your belt before you start kicking around scientific giants of the likes of Neils Bohr."

Frank_Macky

"At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg’s rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully.

Frank_Macky

... Schrodinger thought that a continuum theory of the electron could be successful ... But whenever Schrodinger tried to talk, Bohr would raise his voice and bring up all these counter-examples. Basically he shouted him down.

Interviewer: "It sounds like vanity."

Mead: "Of course. It was a period when physics was full of huge egos ... it isn’t the way science works in the long run [but] it may forestall people from doing sensible work for a long time... They [Bohr and disciples] ended up derailing conceptual physics for the next 70 years."

Frank_Macky

Interviewer: But they [electrons] are also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?

Mead: ... That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it’s the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn’t the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that’s wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium.

Frank_Macky

--- duplicate --- post ---