{"id":315938,"date":"2025-08-04T01:12:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T01:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/315938\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T01:12:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T01:12:13","slug":"scientists-just-admitted-nobody-really-gets-quantum-physics-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/315938\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Just Admitted Nobody Really Gets Quantum Physics : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

The theory of quantum mechanics has transformed daily life since being proposed a century ago, yet how it works remains a mystery \u2013 and physicists are deeply divided about what is actually going on, a survey in the journal Nature<\/a> said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

“Shut up and calculate!” is a famous quote<\/a> in quantum physics that illustrates the frustration of scientists struggling to unravel one of the world’s great paradoxes.<\/p>\n

For the last century, equations based on quantum mechanics have consistently and accurately described the behaviour of extremely small objects.<\/p>\n

However, no one knows what is happening in the physical reality behind the mathematics.<\/p>\n

Related: Could an Overlooked Quantum Theory Help The Universe Make Sense Again?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem started at the turn of the 20th century, when scientists realised that the classical principles of physics did not apply to things on the level on atoms.<\/p>\n

Bafflingly, photons and electrons appear to behave like both particles and waves. They can also be in different positions simultaneously \u2013 and have different speeds or levels of energy.<\/p>\n

In 1925, Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger and Germany’s Werner Heisenberg developed a set of complex mathematical tools that describe quantum mechanics using probabilities.<\/p>\n

This “wave function” made it possible to predict the results of measurements of a particle.<\/p>\n

These equations led to the development of a huge amount of modern technology, including lasers, LED lights, MRI<\/a> scanners and the transistors used in computers and phones.<\/p>\n

But the question remained: what exactly is happening in the world beyond the maths?<\/p>\n

A confusing cat<\/p>\n

To mark the 100th year of quantum mechanics, many of the world’s leading physicists gathered last month<\/a> on the German island of Heligoland, where Heisenberg wrote his famous equation.<\/p>\n

\"HeligolandHeligoland in the North Sea. (Carsten Steger\/Wikimedia commons\/CC-BY-SA 4.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n

More than 1,100 of them responded to a survey conducted by the leading scientific journal Nature.<\/p>\n

The results showed there is a “striking lack of consensus among physicists about what quantum theory says about reality”, Nature said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More than a third \u2013 36 percent \u2013 of the respondents favoured the mostly widely accepted theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation.<\/p>\n

In the classical world, everything has defined properties \u2013 such as position or speed \u2013 whether we observe them or not.<\/p>\n

But this is not the case in the quantum realm, according to the Copenhagen interpretation developed by Heisenberg and Danish physicist Niels Bohr in the 1920s.<\/p>\n

It is only when an observer measures a quantum object that it settles on a specific state from the possible options, goes the theory. This is described as its wave function “collapsing” into a single possibility.<\/p>\n

The most famous depiction of this idea is Schroedinger’s cat<\/a>, which remains simultaneously alive and dead in a box \u2013 until someone peeks inside.<\/p>\n

The Copenhagen interpretation “is the simplest we have”, Brazilian physics philosopher Decio Krause told Nature after responding to the survey.<\/p>\n

Despite the theory’s problems \u2013 such as not explaining why measurement has this effect \u2013 the alternatives “present other problems which, to me, are worse,” he said.<\/p>\n

Enter the multiverse<\/p>\n

But the majority of the physicists supported other ideas.<\/p>\n

Fifteen percent of the respondents opted for the “many worlds” interpretation, one of several theories in physics that propose we live in a multiverse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"multiverse\"Are we living in a quantum multiverse? (Science Photo Library\/Canva<\/a>)<\/p>\n

It asserts that the wave function does not collapse, but instead branches off into as many universes as there are possible outcomes.<\/p>\n

So when an observer measures a particle, they get the position for their world \u2013 but it is in all other possible positions across many parallel universes.<\/p>\n

“It requires a dramatic readjustment of our intuitions about the world, but to me that’s just what we should expect from a fundamental theory of reality,” US theoretical physicist Sean Carroll said in the survey.<\/p>\n

The quantum experts were split on other big questions facing the field.<\/p>\n

Is there some kind of boundary between the quantum and classical worlds, where the laws of physics suddenly change?<\/p>\n

Forty-five percent of the physicists responded yes to this question \u2013 and the exact same percentage responded no.<\/p>\n

Just 24 percent said they were confident the quantum interpretation they chose was correct.<\/p>\n

And three quarters believed that it will be replaced by a more comprehensive theory one day.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Agence France-Presse<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The theory of quantum mechanics has transformed daily life since being proposed a century ago, yet how it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[74,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-315938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114967841605335966","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}