Essays, Elsewhere

Just a brief note that Tim and I have an essay up at Nautilus

How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics
Superdeterminism, a long-abandoned idea, may help us overcome the current crisis in physics.
BY SABINE HOSSENFELDER & TIM PALMER

Quantum mechanics isn't rocket science. But it's well on the way to take the place of rocket science as the go-to metaphor for unintelligible math. Quantum mechanics, you have certainly heard, is infamously difficult to understand. It defies intuition. It makes no sense. Popular science accounts inevitably refer to it as "strange," "weird," "mind-boggling," or all of the above.

We beg to differ. Quantum mechanics is perfectly comprehensible. It's just that physicists abandoned the only way to make sense of it half a century ago. Fast forward to today and progress in the foundations of physics has all but stalled. The big questions that were open then are still open today. We still don't know what dark matter is, we still have not resolved the disagreement between Einstein's theory of gravity and the standard model of particle physics, and we still do not understand how measurements work in quantum mechanics.

How can we overcome this crisis? We think it's about time to revisit a long-forgotten solution, Superdeterminism, the idea that no two places in the universe are truly independent of each other. This solution gives us a physical understanding of quantum measurements, and promises to improve quantum theory. Revising quantum theory would be a game changer for physicists' efforts to solve the other problems in their discipline and to find novel applications of quantum technology.

Head over to Nautilus to read the whole thing. It's a great magazine, btw, and I warmly recommend you follow it.

If you found that interesting, you may also be interested in my contribution to this year's essay contest from the Foundational Questions Institute on Undecidability, Uncomputability, and Unpredictability:

Math Matters
By Sabine Hossenfelder

Gödel taught us that mathematics is incomplete. Turing taught us some problems are undecidable. Lorenz taught us that, try as we might, some things will remain unpredictable. Are such theorems relevant for the real world or are they merely academic curiosities? In this essay, I first explain why one can rightfully be skeptical of the scientific relevance of mathematically proved impossibilities, but that, upon closer inspection, they are both interesting and important.