1 Comment
User's avatar
Miquel Jorquera Riera's avatar

I'm working on the operational approach to QM (see, e.g. Quantum Measurement by Busch et al, 2016), which would fall into the "mathematicians trying to make it sound not weird" category. I'm open to being called out on my BS (better find out I'm wrong sooner rather than later), but I have to disagree that it hides the weirdness behind a wall of symbols. I would say it does the exact opposite. It points a flashlight right at the weirdness. Some of it turns out to not be weird after all, and some of it remains weird, but now we have a language to talk clearly about it.

I should point out that I never use interpretation what actually working on stuff, I do interpretation as a hobby. That's not what the maths are for, we stick to a "minimal interpretation", which is more less "shut up and calculate, but actually shut up this time". The point of formulating QM in a mathematically rigorous way is to tell truth from nonsense. A lot of standard QM is plagued by nonsense that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Of course you end up with extra weirdness when your calculator is broken!

This is very much, of course, an example of xkcd 927, but you can't work for years on a thing if you don't believe it's the right way to do it, dammit!

(Edit: I mean I chose to work on the way I believe is right, not that I chose to believe that the way I work with is right)

Expand full comment