I worry that your "lion" theory maps onto "wavicle" which doesn't seem to be terribly popular these days.
Part of the problem is "interpretational issues" - the available observations can be explained by several different models, there's no possible evidence that can tell the models apart, and some people are stubbornly saying "no no no, you can't possibly speculate on what things are really like, you just have to say what the observations are and give the associated regularities".
So under shut-up-and-calculate, you're pretty much forced to go on about wave-particle dualities. Many-worlds is basically a wave-only theory (and quantisation causes particle-like behaviour), Bohmian mechanics posits that there are both particles and waves that guide them, thus causing the particles to have wave-like behaviour, etc.
The undergrad chemist's view is that if we talk about things in overall steady states, like atoms, at one level we can talk about particles - we can say, "here's a list of the positions of the particles, they're basically point mass/charges, and they act on each other by ordinary boring electrostatics, you can calculate the potential energy without too much fuss" - and then you define something that's a bit like a probability distribution over those lists - except the "probabilities" are complex numbers - and call it the wavefunction, and then the wavefunction relates to things you can actually observe, "electron density is the square of the wavefunction". This works reasonably well for atoms and molecules, but starts to get mindbending when cats enter the picture. Chemists don't generally worry about how QM relates to things outside their area, not professionally anyway, and so can dodge a lot of the complicated issues that physicists have to grapple with.
You'll notice I haven't said "Copenhagen" yet; AFAICT "Copenhagen" seems to be used for two different things, one is for something like shut-up-and-calculate and one is for some weird thing involving "objective collapse".
no subject
Date: 2017-04-21 08:26 am (UTC)I worry that your "lion" theory maps onto "wavicle" which doesn't seem to be terribly popular these days.
Part of the problem is "interpretational issues" - the available observations can be explained by several different models, there's no possible evidence that can tell the models apart, and some people are stubbornly saying "no no no, you can't possibly speculate on what things are really like, you just have to say what the observations are and give the associated regularities".
So under shut-up-and-calculate, you're pretty much forced to go on about wave-particle dualities. Many-worlds is basically a wave-only theory (and quantisation causes particle-like behaviour), Bohmian mechanics posits that there are both particles and waves that guide them, thus causing the particles to have wave-like behaviour, etc.
The undergrad chemist's view is that if we talk about things in overall steady states, like atoms, at one level we can talk about particles - we can say, "here's a list of the positions of the particles, they're basically point mass/charges, and they act on each other by ordinary boring electrostatics, you can calculate the potential energy without too much fuss" - and then you define something that's a bit like a probability distribution over those lists - except the "probabilities" are complex numbers - and call it the wavefunction, and then the wavefunction relates to things you can actually observe, "electron density is the square of the wavefunction". This works reasonably well for atoms and molecules, but starts to get mindbending when cats enter the picture. Chemists don't generally worry about how QM relates to things outside their area, not professionally anyway, and so can dodge a lot of the complicated issues that physicists have to grapple with.
You'll notice I haven't said "Copenhagen" yet; AFAICT "Copenhagen" seems to be used for two different things, one is for something like shut-up-and-calculate and one is for some weird thing involving "objective collapse".