>>10874553Part II of the Foreword from 'Quantum Physics without Quantum Philosophy"
"It has to face competition from other empirically accurate theories, and there might be disputes over which of the various contenders is the most promising. But a fair competition requires that all the contestants be judged on their merits, which demands that each be clearly and sympathetically presented. This book supplies such a presentation.
Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. On certain topics, cool rational judgment is hard to find, and quantum mechanics is one of those topics. For reasons rooted in the tortuous history of the theory, clear and straightforward physical theories that can account for the phenomena treated by quantum mechanics are viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. These phenomena, it is said, admit of no clear or “classical” explanation, and anyone who thinks that they do has not appreciated the revolutionary character of the quantum world. In order to “understand” quantum phenomena, it is said, we must renounce classical logic, or amend classical probability theory, or admit a plethora of invisible universes, or recognize the central role that conscious observers play in production of the physical world. Lest the reader think I am exaggerating, there are many clear examples of each of these. The Many Worlds interpretation posits that whenever quantum theory seems to present a probability, there is in fact a multiplicity: Schrödinger’s cat splits into a myriad of cats in each experiment, some of which are alive and some dead. Defenders of the “consistent histories” approach insist that classical logic must be abandoned: in some cases, the claim P can be true and the claim Q can be true but the conjunction “P and Q” be not only not true, but meaningless. David Mermin, in a famous article on Bell’s theorem, asserts that “[w]e now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.”
