>>11768080That's exactly the argument that always misses the point.
>we got technology out of it, so just go with itThe point is that applications are not all that matters. This argument could just as easily be applied to ancient astronomical calendars. They work, and they have formulae built in which give corrections to the errors which build up over time so as to allow them to keep giving correct physical descriptions. But predictions should not be an obstacle to rethinking the actual representation behind the theory, because without an idea of what the theory represents, it is not possible to move to a radically new one: applying "shut up and calculate" is essentially why the Mayans had their mechanistic calculus but Europe leaped forward with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
>either proven wrong (anything involving hidden variables)And if you're referring to Von Neumann's proof this is just an old-fashioned misconception. His argument is circular and was only rejected too late, by which time the damage had already been done.
The fact remains that the predictive power of the formulae of quantum mechanics should not be an obstacle to reinterpretations of what the theory actually means. To say otherwise is to make physicists take the role of vastly inferior mathematicians, and blunt any kind of incisive vision we used to have that allowed us to see new theories.
>offer no predictive valueFirstly, this is false. Just last year Howard Carmichael's stochastic ideas of how quantum transitions work back in the 90s allowed those experiments to be done in which they showed that transitions don't actually need to be instantaneous.
Secondly, the predictive value is not the full point, and it's this obsession with what symbolic manipulations "do" rather than what the ideas mean or represent which drives theoretical insight, and the lack thereof is what stifles it.
