Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
4 - What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
from Part One - Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
Summary
Attitudes toward quantum mechanics differ interestingly from one generation of physicists to the next. The first generation are the founding fathers, who struggled through the welter of confusing and self-contradictory constructions to emerge with the modern theory of the atomic world and supply it with the “Copenhagen interpretation.” On the whole they seem to have taken the view that while the theory is extraordinarily strange (Bohr is said to have remarked that if it didn't make you dizzy then you didn't really understand it), the strangeness arises out of some deeply ingrained but invalid modes of thought. Once these are recognized and abandoned the theory makes sense in a perfectly straightforward way. The word “irrational,” which appears frequently in Bohr's early writings about the quantum theory, is almost entirely absent from his later essays.
The second generation, those who were students of the founding fathers in the early postrevolutionary period, seem firmly—at times even ferociously—committed to the position that there is really nothing peculiar about the quantum world at all. Far from making bons mots about dizziness, or the opposite of deep truths being deep truths, they appear to go out of their way to make quantum mechanics sound as boringly ordinary as possible.
The third generation—mine—were born a decade or so after the revolution and learned about the quantum as kids from popular books like George Gamow's. We seem to be much more relaxed about it than the other two. Few of us brood about what it all means, any more than we worry about how to define mass or time when we use classical mechanics. In contemplative moments some of us think the theory is wonderfully strange and others think it isn't; but we don't hold these views with great passion. Most of us, in fact, feel irritated, bored, or downright uncomfortable when asked to articulate what we really think about quantum mechanics.
I'm one of the uncomfortable ones. If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be “Shut up and calculate!” But I won't shut up. I would rather celebrate the strangeness of quantum theory than deny it, because I believe it still has interesting things to teach us about how certain powerful but flawed verbal and mental tools we once took for granted continue to infect our thinking in subtly hidden ways.
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- Why Quark Rhymes with PorkAnd Other Scientific Diversions, pp. 23 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016