QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics
Hans Christian von Baeyer, Lili von Baeyer [illustrations]
It works flawlessly and has never let me down—or anybody else for that matter. But even as I used it and taught it, at some deep level I knew that I didn’t really get it. I felt as if I were merely going through the motions that the pioneers of the theory choreographed long ago. Like all physicists I am fluent in Newtonian physics, also known as classical physics, and when the occasion demands, I rattle off its decrees, chapter and verse, the way an evangelist quotes the Bible, but I was never able to attain that same feeling of familiarity with quantum mechanics.
There is a strangeness about quantum mechanics that is rooted not in its mathematical complexity but in the paradoxes and enigmas that have bedeviled it from birth. One of the most famous of those conundrums is the story of Schrödinger’s hapless cat, which according to quantum mechanics is supposed to be both alive and dead at the same time. Other mysteries include the claim that a quantum particle can seem to be in two places at once, that particles can behave like waves and waves like particles, and that information appears to be transmitted instantaneously. Collectively, these puzzles have been called quantum weirdness. (…)