söndag 18 december 2022

Crisis of Nobel Prizes in Physics to Quantum Mechanics



The theoretical mathematical foundation of modern physics is commonly is commonly viewed to be Quantum Mechanics QM and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, although incompatible. Einstein did not get any Nobel Prize for his theories of relativity and the only Prize for related work is that to 
  • 2020 Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”.
The Prizes to theoretical QM are:
  • 1932 Werner Karl Heisenberg “for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen”. 
  • 1933 Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.
  • 1945 Wolfgang Pauli “for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle”.
  • 1954 Max Born “for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction”.
with continuation into quantum field theory:
followed by  
confronting quantum theory with experiments for "entangled photons". There are a few more Prizes to experimental QM, but that's it as concerns theory. 

We read that the major theoretical work on QM was completed in the 1930s (with delayed Prizes to Pauli and Born) with apparently little added since then worthy of a Prize. 

This is remarkable since already from start the theory of QM showed to harbour deep problems, which would have earned Prizes if resolved. 

But that did not happen. This is strange, as a reflection of the "strangeness" of QM. Why has no progress been made for nearly 100 years on theoretical QM worthy of a Nobel Prize? Is this the root of the "crisis of modern physics" witnessed by so many physicists (also here).

Time to make a fresh start with RealQM?

PS Here is how Simon Saunders starts the book Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory and Reality (2010):
  • Ask not if quantum mechanics is true, ask rather what the theory implies. 
  • What does realism about the quantum state imply? What follows then, when quantum theory is applied without restriction, if need be to the whole universe?
  • This is the question that this book addresses. The answers vary widely. According to one view, ‘what follows’ is a detailed and realistic picture of reality that provides a unified description of micro- and macroworlds. 
  • But according to another, the result is nonsense — there is no physically meaningful theory at all, or not in the sense of a realist theory, a theory supposed to give an intelligible picture of a reality existing independently of our thoughts and beliefs. 
  • According to the latter view, the formalism of quantum mechanics, if applied unrestrictedly, is at best a fragment of such a theory, in need of substantive additional assumptions and equations.
  • So sharp a division about what appears to be a reasonably well-defined question is all the more striking given how much agreement there is otherwise, for all parties to the debate in this book are agreed on realism, and on the need, or the aspiration, for a theory that unites micro- and macroworlds, at least in principle. 
  • They all see it as legitimate—obligatory even—to ask whether the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, principally the Schrödinger equation, already constitute such a system. 
  • They all agree that such equations, if they are to be truly fundamental, must ultimately apply to the entire universe. And most of the authors also agree that the quantum state should be treated as something physically real. 
  • But now disagreements set in.
Ok, so we learn that all parties agree on the need of a theory for the microworld of atoms and molecules as something physically real, but disagree on what such a theory could be. This is as far as theoretical physics has come 2022.  You could call it a crisis.  

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