Quantum Physics Without Explanations

I asked chatGPT if some form of scientific crime was committed (intellectual failure) when quantum mechanics replaced classical mechanics, and received the answer reported below. See also follow up with a defense from physics establishment of status quo.

This gives a background to the evaluation of RealQM submitted to Foundations of Chemistry. In particular it states that my question is legitimate. What RealQM offers is prediction + explanation, as the objective of classical science given up in modern physics.

chatGPT:

1. Start with the historical bind physicists were in

By the mid-1920s, physicists faced a crisis:

• Classical physics failed catastrophically (spectra, stability of matter).

• Experiments were precise and unforgiving.

• Any theory that explained beautifully but predicted poorly was useless.

Then quantum mechanics appeared and did something unprecedented:

• It worked numerically.

• It worked universally.

• It worked immediately.

But it did not explain what was going on.

Physicists faced a forced choice:

1. Demand meaning and lose predictive power

2. Accept prediction and suspend meaning

They chose survival.

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2. The decisive move: redefine what counts as “science”

Under that pressure, physics quietly adopted a new rule:

If a formalism predicts outcomes reliably, questions about meaning are optional.

This was not argued for.
It was institutionalized by success.

That is not corruption — it is pragmatism under crisis.

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3. Why this hardened into dogma

Once QM succeeded:

• Careers were built on it

• Technologies depended on it

• Entire subfields grew around calculational mastery

At that point, questioning foundations became:

• professionally risky,

• intellectually sidelined,

• rhetorically framed as “philosophy”.

Again: not a crime — path dependence.

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4. Where the real intellectual failure occurred

The failure was not adopting a predictive formalism.

The failure was this silent substitution:

• Saying “QM predicts measurement outcomes”

• While allowing people to believe “QM explains physical reality”

That ambiguity was never cleaned up.

So the issue is not malice — it’s conceptual negligence.

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5. Why chemistry exposes the fault line

Physics can survive with prediction-only success.
Chemistry cannot.

Chemistry needs:

• structure,

• locality,

• mechanism,

• stability narratives.

QM delivers constraints, not those explanations.

So chemists feel the gap that physicists learned to live with.

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6. The most accurate verdict

Here is the fairest possible statement:

Physicists did not commit a crime.
They made an emergency methodological retreat and never fully acknowledged the cost.

What you’re reacting to is not corruption —
it’s unfinished science being treated as final authority.

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7. One-line bottom line

Prediction replaced explanation,
pragmatism replaced realism,
and success froze the compromise in place.

Calling this out is not an attack on science.
It’s a demand for intellectual honesty about what QM does — and does not — provide.

That demand is legitimate.

Defense of Status Quo by Physics Establishment:

• Quantum mechanics is complete as a scientific foundation because it correctly constrains all physically possible chemical phenomena.
• Chemistry does not require QM to deliver structure, mechanisms, or intuition directly; it only requires that its models respect quantum constraints. 
• Chemical concepts (bonds, orbitals, reactions) are effective, emergent tools built within those constraints. 
• The inability to derive chemistry transparently from Schrödinger’s equation is a practical and epistemic limitation, not a failure of QM. 
• No alternative framework constrains chemistry more accurately or universally.