Physics highlights from What is Real – Economist Writing Every Day

Some highlights from reading the book What is Real? The unfinished search for the meaning of quantum physics*

Page 9 “The godfather of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, spoke of a separation between the world of large objects, in which classical Newtonian physics rules, and the small objects, in which quantum physics rules.”

The book contains several dramas centered on Einstein’s rejection of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

The title of Chapter 2 is so excellent: “Chapter 2: Something Rotten in the State of Denmark”

P. 37 “But Max Born had discovered a piece of the puzzle this summer. He found that the wave function of a particle at a location gives the probability of measuring the particle at that location – and that the wave function collapses as soon as the measurement occurs… The measurement problem was there.”

P. 56 “Einstein rejected any violation of locality and in a letter to Max Born called it “scary action from a distance.”

Page 79 “By the end of the war, the Manhattan Project had cost the nation nearly $25 billion and employed 125,000 people at thirty-one different locations across the United States and Canada. “Hundreds of physicists were recalled from their everyday laboratory work…After the war, physical research in the United States never returned to what it was…Condemned by its success…military research funds flowed into physics.”

P. 82 “Research into the meaning of quantum physics was one of the casualties of the war. With all these new students crowding classrooms across the country, professors have been unable to convey the philosophical questions underlying quantum physics.”

Joy: The politics of physics in science was interesting to me. For this reason alone, I recommend this book to university economists.

Page 100 “The photons are intentionally disturbing you”

Attention experimentalists, page 104 “The history that accompanies a scientific theory influences the experiments that scientists conduct.”

Joy: The lack of the internet has significantly slowed down the spread of the right ideas. But eventually, over the course of a few decades and with some career losses, the more correct information seemed to influence the consensus.

Joy: I’m used to economists having very fundamental and sometimes heated disagreements. One could say that topics in economics are somewhat more subjective than a topic in science. However, because quantum physics turns out to be so strange, there are also strong disagreements among physicists.

An equivalent book for economics might be Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar.

Page 108: “Bohm’s theory also emerged at the height of Zhdanovism, an ideological campaign by the Stalinist USSR to eradicate any work that showed even the slightest hint of conflict with the ideals of Soviet communism.”

Page 124: “This universal wave function, according to Everett, obeyed the Schrödinger equation at all times and never collapsed, but instead split.” Every experiment, every quantum event…creates a multitude of universes…”

*Many thanks to Josh Reeves and Samford University for purchasing the book for me.

Related previous posts: Is the universe readable by intelligence?

Thoughts on the Oppenheimer film

Literature research is a difficult intellectual task