Before slitting the atom through two doors at once, we need to make a pseudo-comparison. What’s matter? 

Quarks are like bricks of a house (protons) and Leptons (electron family) are like the dirt of the garden. The force carriers (bosons) are like the cement that hold the bricks together. But there are tensions at home. In order to keep the (negative) electrons in check we know that we need a (positive) proton nucleus to form an atom (a property — a house with a garden). The electron spins with two angular momentums around this proton forever — as long as it’s not too hot nor too cold. This is hydrogen, the most abundant atomic configuration in the universe by far, with one proton and one electron.

Simple as houses.

As a god built this complex universe in six days (why six? why not in a jiffy, or is it a question of appreciation as the job is being done on an eight hour day creation programme?) and the Universe built itself in 13.8 billion years from a big bang that probably came about from a singular random deficiency in anti-matter in a well-poised system of pulsing strings, scientists of the present era are dispiriting at the idiots in power, from Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and the failed Hillary. Imagine the most intelligent humans on the planet, the scientists, being relegated to bottom class thinktankers by believing idiots in charge of making decisions and war. Brother!

Before going to our double-slit experiment, which is easy to do at home (not really), contrarily to many dangerous things shown on Mythbusters (don’t try this at home — like blowing up a dry-cement truck with a ton of C4), we might need to investigate Mesons. These suicidal particles live in the Hadron suburbia — like the Protons and Neutrons — but they’re a bit loony and very short lived. 

Before Gus's explanation of the double slit conundrum, we do another long philosophical detour via the USA where quantum mechanics could be losing its flavour — possibly because god let's churches be burned down by whatever mysteries...

No other scientific theory can match the depth, range, and accuracy of quantum mechanics. It sheds light on deep theoretical questions — such as why matter doesn’t collapse — and abounds with practical applications — transistors, lasers, MRI scans. It has been validated by empirical tests with astonishing precision, comparable to predicting the distance between Los Angeles and New York to within the width of a human hair.

And no other theory is so weird: Light, electrons, and other fundamental constituents of the world sometimes behave as waves, spread out over space, and other times as particles, each localized to a certain place. These models are incompatible, and which one the world seems to reveal will be determined by what question is asked of it. The uncertainty principle says that trying to measure one property of an object more precisely will make measurements of other properties less precise. And the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics says that those properties don’t even exist until they’re observed — the observation is what brings them about.

“I think I can safely say,” wrote Richard Feynman, one of the subject’s masters, “that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” He went on to add, “Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” Understandably, most working scientists would rather apply their highly successful tools than probe the perplexing question of what those tools mean.

The prevailing answer to that question has been the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, developed in the circle led by Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. About this orthodoxy N. David Mermin, some intellectual generations removed from Bohr, famously complained, “If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be ‘Shut up and calculate!’” It works. Stop kvetching. Why fix what ain’t broke? Mermin later regretted sounding snotty, but re-emphasized that the question of meaning is important and remains open. The physicist Roderich Tumulka, as quoted in a 2016 interview, is more pugnacious: “Ptolemy’s theory” — of an earth-centered universe — “made perfect sense. It just happened not to be right. But Copenhagen quantum mechanics is incoherent, and thus is not even a reasonable theory to begin with.” This, you will not be surprised to learn, has been disputed.

In What Is Real? the physicist and science writer Adam Becker offers a history of what his subtitle calls “the unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics.” Although it is certainly unfinished, it is, as quests go, a few knights short of a Round Table. After the generation of pioneers, foundational work in quantum mechanics became stigmatized as a fringe pursuit, a career killer. So Becker’s well-written book is part science, part sociology (a study of the extrascientific forces that helped solidify the orthodoxy), and part drama (a story of the ideas and often vivid personalities of some dissenters and the shabby treatment they have often received).

The publisher’s blurb breathlessly promises “the untold story of the heretical thinkers who dared to question the nature of our quantum universe” and a “gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth.” But What Is Real? doesn’t live down to that lurid black-and-white logline. It does make a heartfelt and persuasive case that serious problems with the foundations of quantum mechanics have been persistently, even disgracefully, swept under the carpet.

Why does that matter? Because, as John Stewart Bell, one of the book’s heroes, believed, the attempt to provide understanding is a moral matter. Dismissing philosophical criticism is not only philistine, it’s bad science. Physics isn’t finished. A theory is not only a way to address the problems at hand; it’s a jumping off point for the next, better, theory. And quantum mechanics is the theory that any new idea in fundamental physics must accommodate.

Quantum mechanics proper began in the mid-1920s with Werner Heisenberg’s “matrix mechanics” and Erwin Schrödinger’s “wave mechanics.” These mathematical formalisms — later shown to be equivalent — unified revolutionary but ad hoc ideas about the atomic and subatomic world that had earlier been advanced by, among others, Bohr and Albert Einstein.

Becker begins his story proper with one of history’s most famous scientific gatherings, the Solvay Conference of 1927. Of its twenty-nine attendees, seventeen were or would become Nobel laureates. Their meeting to discuss the new quantum theory inaugurated a long and famous debate between Bohr and Einstein. Bohr championed the “Copenhagen interpretation,” a name generally believed to have been introduced by Heisenberg in 1955. This was never a precisely defined set of beliefs, but Becker says the core that Bohr’s circle could agree on can be summarized as follows:

● It is not possible, even in principle, to explain the quantum world independently of observation.

● Physics therefore concerns not what nature is but what we can say about it.

● Quantum mechanics is in essence a tool to predict the outcomes of measurements.

These beliefs in turn accorded with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, whose ideas were very much in the air. Positivism was more a philosophical movement than a single doctrine. Its themes included: reductionism and a hostility to metaphysics; various forms of the “verificationist” axiom that the meaning of a statement lies in its method of verification and that statements not capable of verification are meaningless; a strong strain of “antirealism,” which held that scientific theories serve only as a way to generate testable assertions and do not imply that the nouns they use denote things in the real world. (Becker goes overboard when he says that positivists ruled out theories referring to entities that could not be directly observed.)

Einstein, by contrast, was a scientific realist: The aim of science is to understand a world that exists independently of our observation; thus, quantum mechanics, despite its impressive success, could not be the whole story. The conventional wisdom about this debate says that a reactionary Einstein, past his prime, couldn’t get with the program, lost the argument, and thereby validated the Copenhagen interpretation. That, says Becker, is a fable — because, among other reasons, few of his opponents understood what Einstein was really driving at.

Bohr and his associates corresponded with the philosophical luminaries of the Vienna Circle. But for most physicists, says Becker, the Copenhagen interpretation amounted not to a carefully considered philosophical position but to a permission slip for dismissing questions, a sort of bar room putdown: Why worry about things you can’t see — such as whether, when you’re not looking, a light beam is made of particles or waves? To respond to this question, it’s worth briefly rewinding.

At the end of the nineteenth century, fundamental physics modeled the constituents of the world as particles (discrete lumps of stuff localized in space) and fields (gravity and electromagnetism, continuous and spread throughout space). Particles traveled through the fields, interacting with them and with each other. Light was a wave rippling through the electromagnetic field.

Quantum mechanics arose when certain puzzling phenomena seemed explicable only by supposing that light, firmly established by Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism as a wave, was acting as if composed of particles. French physicist Louis de Broglie then postulated that all the things believed to be particles could at times behave like waves.

Consider the famous “double-slit” experiment. The experimental apparatus consists of a device that sends electrons, one at a time, toward a barrier with a slit in it and, at some distance behind the barrier, a screen that glows wherever an electron strikes it. The journey of each electron can be usefully thought of in two parts. In the first, the electron either hits the barrier and stops, or it passes through the slit. In the second, if the electron does pass through the slit, it continues on to the screen. The flashes seen on the screen line up with the gun and slit, just as we’d expect from a particle fired like a bullet from the electron gun.

But if we now cut another slit in the barrier, it turns out that its mere existence somehow affects the second part of an electron’s journey. The screen lights up in unexpected places, not always lined up with either of the slits — as if, on reaching one slit, an electron checks whether it had the option of going through the other one and, if so, acquires permission to go anywhere it likes. Well, not quiteanywhere: Although we can’t predict where any particular shot will strike the screen, we can statistically predict the overall results of many shots. Their accumulation produces a pattern that looks like the pattern formed by two waves meeting on the surface of a pond. Waves interfere with one another: When two crests or two troughs meet, they reinforce by making a taller crest or deeper trough; when a crest meets a trough, they cancel and leave the surface undisturbed. In the pattern that accumulates on the screen, bright places correspond to reinforcement, dim places to cancellation.

We rethink. Perhaps, taking the pattern as a clue, an electron is really like a wave, a ripple in some field. When the electron wave reaches the barrier, part of it passes through one slit, part through the other, and the pattern we see results from their interference.

There’s an obvious problem: Maybe a stream of electrons can act like a wave (as a stream of water molecules makes up a water wave), but our apparatus sends electrons one at a time. The electron-as-wave model thus requires that firing a single electron causes something to pass through both slits. To check that, we place beside each slit a monitor that will signal when it sees something pass. What we find on firing the gun is that one monitor or the other may signal, but never both; a single electron doesn’t go through both slits. Even worse, when the monitors are in place, no interference pattern forms on the screen. This attempt to observe directly how the pattern arose eliminates what we’re trying to explain. We have to rethink again.

At which point Copenhagen says: Stop! This is puzzling enough without creating unnecessary difficulties. All we actually observe is where an electron strikes the screen — or, if the monitors have been installed, which slit it passes through. If we insist on a theory that accounts for the electron’s journey — the purely hypothetical track of locations it passes through on the way to where it’s actually seen — that theory will be forced to account for where it is when we’re not looking. Pascual Jordan, an important member of Bohr’s circle, cut the Gordian knot: An electron does not have a position until it is observed; the observation is what compels it to assume one. Quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions about where it is more or less likely to be observed.

...

He summarizes the state of quantum mechanics as “a wildly successful theory, an embarrassment of interpretations, and a major challenge in moving past our theory to the next one.” The small but vigorous community doing work on foundations is less marginal than it used to be. The book’s final section sketches some of its current research and concludes modestly that the wisest course at present is accepting a pluralism of interpretations, or “at least humility.” “Quantum physics is at least approximately correct.... We just don’t know what that means yet. And it’s the job of physics to find out.”

But to do that, says Becker, technical ideas about physics must take their place within a larger context. And here he quotes Einstein: “A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background” is necessary for a scientist to become free of the “prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

Read more:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/make-physics-real-again

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On this site we are not afraid nor are we cynical about the greatest challenges to understand. We can be satirical about the idiots who think everything is settled by the theory of god. It ain't cutting it. Experiments have shown deeper menaninglessness in the constructs of matter. Yet this has inference. The universe has no morality in it and it's up to us to choose our purpose of survival.

Gus is a rabid atheist.

"Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy6TV9Dntlw&t=3s

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