Curt Jaimungal
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2026
2:14:31 · 489K views · Nov 13, 2024
Physicist Jacob Barandes discusses his view that quantum mechanics can be formulated without wave functions, using a stochastic, probabilistic approach. The long interview covers measurement, the foundations of quantum theory and the history of the field.
HN commenters point to it as a credible, clearly explained alternative take on quantum foundations from a Harvard physicist.
3 comments from Hacker News
I would recommend watching Curt Jaimungal's series of talks with Jacob Barandes. He gives a nice background history of various aspects of QM, including the formulation of Matrix and Wave mechanics (and loads of other ideas). Barandes is excellent at clearly articulating complex ideas in very simple, concise terms. He also has his own formulation of QM based on "Indivisible non-Markovian Stochastic Processes". Even if you disagree with his ideas, the interviews are quite fascinating. In this interview he goes over pretty much exactly what you mentioned (and a lot more): this video
Jacob Barandes is a professor of physics at Harvard (not a crank). He recently did a great podcast with Kurt Jaimungal [1]. In the interview he explains that every year he searches for a good way to introduce his students to quantum mechanics, and every year he's ended up being unsatisfied with the approach and started again. One year he decided to attempt describing systems with traditional mechanics, using probabilities (stochastic mechanics). He worked at it and worked at it, assuming that he would eventually have to take some leap to cross the chasm into the world of gauge theory, Lie Groups, and Hilbert spaces. What he found is, to his surprise, the math just seemed to fit together at some point. That is, he found a mapping, just as the path integral is a mapping into the math of the wave function, and it just kind of worked. He had been under the assumption that it shouldn't. It turns out, that in doing his stochastic mechanics, he had used mathematical descriptions that were indivisible. That is once a given process began, it could not be sliced into smaller and smaller time slices. It had to complete and yield a result. This was what he called a non-Markov stochastic process. Apparently all previous attempts at this used Markov processes, which are divisible like Hilbert vector calculations or the path integral. It turns out that things like "collapse" of the wave function, and all the quantum weirdness arose from how the math worked with the wave function and Hilbert
I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that just haven't been figured out. Electrons are helically moving photons: [LINK] That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more research to improve those calculations - like deriving the electron charge and magnetic moment. Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3 up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are reasons they "know" this is not the case. I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM: this video IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle accelerators.