Something Deeply Hidden Gönderileri
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So what we really have is a superposition of all possible combinations of where the electron might have been located, and where the camera actually observed it to be.
There is no such thing as “the position of the electron.” There is only the electron’s wave function. Quantum mechanics implies a profound distinction between “what we can observe” and “what there really is.” Our observations aren’t revealing pre-existing facts of which we were previously ignorant; at best, they reveal a tiny slice of a much bigger, fundamentally elusive reality.
The world is a wave function, nothing more nor less. We can use the phrase “quantum state” as a synonym for “wave function,” in direct parallel with calling a set of positions and velocities a “classical state.”
Even if we think an electron wave function is a diffuse cloud centered on the nucleus, when we actually look at it we don’t see such a cloud, we see a point-like particle at some particular location. And if we look immediately again, we see the electron in basically the same location. There’s a good reason why the pioneers of quantum mechanics invented the idea of wave functions collapsing—because that’s what they appear to do.
Hidden variables
But Bell’s theorem implies that any such theory requires “action at a distance”—a measurement at one location can instantly affect the state of the universe arbitrarily far away. This seems to be in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the theory of relativity, which says that objects and influences cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. The hidden-variable approach is still being actively pursued, but all known attempts along these lines are ungainly and hard to reconcile with modern theories such as the Standard Model of particle physics, not to mention speculative ideas about quantum gravity, as we’ll discuss later. Perhaps this is why Einstein, the pioneer of relativity, never found a satisfactory theory of his own.
To put things most pointedly: Why do quantum systems evolve smoothly and deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as long as we aren’t looking at them, but then dramatically collapse when we do look? How do they know, and why do they care?