New Paradigm of Computational Quantum Mechanics vs ESS

ESS as European Spallation Source is a €3 billion projected research facility captured by clever Swedish politicians to be allocated to the plains outside the old university town Lund in Southern Sweden with start in 2025: Neutrons are excellent for probing materials on the molecular level – everything from motors and medicine, to plastics and proteins. ESS will provide around 30 times brighter neuutron beams than existing facilities today. The difference between the current neutron sources and ESS is something like the difference between taking a picture in the glow of a candle, or doing it under flash lighting.

Quantum mechanics was invented in the 1920s under limits of pen and paper computation but allowing limitless theory thriving in Hilbert spaces populated by multidimensional wave functions described by fancy symbols on paper. Lofty theory and sparse computation was compensated by inflating the observer role of the physicist to a view that only physics observed by a physicist was real physics, with extra support from a conviction that the life or death of Schrödinger's cat depended more on the observer than on the cat and that supercolliders are very expensive. The net result was (i) uncomputable limitless theory combined with (ii) unobservable practice as the essence of the Copenhagen Interpretation filling text books.

Today the computer opens to a change from impossibility to possibility, but this requires a fundamental change of the mathematical models from uncomputable to computable non-linear systems of 3d of Hartree-Schrödinger equations (HSE) or Density Functional Theory (DFT). This brings theory and computation together into a new paradigm of Computational Quantum Mechanics CQM shortly summarized as follows:

1. Experimental inspection of microscopic physics difficult/impossible.
2. HSE-DFT for many-particle systems are solvable computationally. 
3. HSE-DFT simulation allows detailed inspection of microscopics.
4. Assessment of HSE simulations can be made by comparing macroscopic outputs with observation. 

The linear multidimensional Schrödinger equation has no meaning in CQM and a new foundation is asking to be developed. The role of observation in the Copenhagen Interpretation is taken over by computation in CQM: Only computable physics is real physics, at least if physics is a form of analog computation, which may well be the case. The big difference is that anything computed can be inspected and observed, which opens to non-destructive testing with only limits set by computational power.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the projected neutron collider European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund in Sweden represent the old paradigm of smashing to pieces the fragile structure under investigation and as such may well be doomed.