Name: Quantum mechanics and experience
ISBN: 9780674741133

Quantum mechanics and experience

"The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science." "This book is an original and provocative investigation of that challenge, as well as a novel attempt at writing about science in a style that is simultaneously elementary and deep. It is a lucid and self-contained introduction to the foundations of quantum mechanics, accessible to anyone with a high school mathematics education, and at the same time a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of that subject, some of which are due to the author himself." "For Albert, the problem of measurement is the central problem of quantum mechanics, and he devotes particular attention to various attempts to solve it - including theories of the collapse of the wave function, hidden-variable theories, and multiple-universe theories.

What Hacker News says

LucOct 2025

They have written some good books too.

I especially like 'Quantum Mechanics and Experience' by David Z Albert (he's got a very peculiar style of writing that I enjoy), and 'Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity' by Tim Maudlin.

Not easy reading, but manageable if you have a physics degree.

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lisperSep 2021

The best of what's available at the moment is (IMHO):

David Z. Albert, "Quantum Mechanics and Experience"

Tim Maudlin, "Philosophy of Science: Quantum Mechanics" (Space and Time is also a good read.)

But I'm actually contemplating writing a book of my own because I think there's still a pretty significant gap insofar as none of these books get into quantum information theory at all, which I think is crucial to having a really solid understanding.

Another really good book is this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Challenge-Foundations-Mechani...

though it's a tad pricey, but it's actually a really good mix of technical and historical content because it describes the experiments that were done to show that the many unintuitive predictions of QM are actually true.

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lisperDec 2020

Just about any modern book on QM interpretation will tell you this, though not in so many words. (They won't necessarily endorse this point of view, but they will tell you about it.) Here is my take on it:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

(Or the movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc )

(These are now a wee bit dated, but still defensible.)

For something written by an actual physicist I recommend anything by Tim Maudlin (he's a Bohmian, but his pedagogy is without peer) or David Z. Alberts, "Quantum Mechanics and Experience."

UPDATE: There's also https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616

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mzaccariMar 2020

For the last few years I've had the Feynman Lectures [1,2] sitting in my queue, and I've finally gotten around to starting them in the last week. It's been a fun ride so far, and it's been nice to have the time to digest the lessons without having to run off somewhere. It's also helped to have the MIT OCW lectures as a reference [3], in which I found a book title "Quantum Mechanics and Experience" [4] that I started reading as well and so far has been the most down-to-earth introduction to Quantum Mechanics that I've found. I highly recommend it.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed-set/dp...

[3] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-04-quantum-physics-i-s...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674741137/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

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lisperJul 2019

The best place to find the answer to this question that I know of it David Z. Albert's excellent book, "Quantum Mechanics and Experience." But the short answer to your question is that Bohmian mechanics has two problems:

1. In order to account for the outcome of Bell-type experiments on entangled particles it has to assign a temporal ordering to space-like separated events. The technical term for this is that you have to choose a "preferred foliation of space-time". There has to be a preferred reference frame. But you can never actually know what the preferred reference frame actually is.

2. Yes, particles "have positions", but you can never actually know what those position are (which is why I put "have positions" in scare quotes). This is where all the quantum randomness hides in Bohmian mechanics. It's all "pre-computed" in the infinite precision of a particle's position, but that position is necessarily hidden from observation. I call this an IPU, an Invisible Pink Unicorn. It's exactly the same thing as universe-weights in MWI -- a set of numbers that are part of the theory but rendered immune from observation not by practical limitations on technology, but by the theory itself.

This is the fundamental problem with all attempts to make quantum mechanics look deterministic. The simple fact of the matter is that it's not deterministic, so any attempt to make it look deterministic that makes the same predictions as QM has to hide the randomness somewhere. Bohm hides it in particle positions, and MWI hides it in universe weights. But it doesn't matter what you call the place in the theory where you've hidden the randomness. What matters is that there is a place in the theory where you've hidden the randomness, where it must forever remain hidden from the prying eyes of experiment. So the claims that both Bohm and MWI make of being deterministic are misleading at best.

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nessus42Mar 2013

MWI certainly does make falsifiable claims. It's just that different interpretations of QM are extremely difficult to experimentally distinguish with any technology we are likely to have in the foreseeable future.

The only well-known interpretation of QM that is experimentally indistinguishable--in theory--from MWI is Bohm's Interpretation. And I think it would be a difficult row to hoe that Bohm's Interpretation is simpler than MWI, as Bohm's universe contains the MWI universe as a subset in the form of pilot waves that never collapse. I.e., the only difference between MWI and Bohm is that in Bohm, one of the "worlds" is granted reality, while the others are not.

Of course, there's nothing in MWI that grants all the worlds reality either. Someone can certainly remain agnostic about that. E.g., Stehphen Hawking has said that MWI is obviously true, though he is agnostic on the reality of the other worlds.

For more information on this, including a tutorial on all the linear algebra that you need to understand, see the book Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Albert.

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