The Fundamental Belief of a Modern Physicist

Profession of Faith

According to the conversation with chatGPT linked below, a modern physicist will have to confess to the following fundamental faith (F): 

• True solution of Schrödinger's equation of quantum mechanics (S) always match experimental observation.   

The confession includes the following qualifications:

1. There is no experiment contradicting (F).
2. (F) is to be viewed true until proven wrong. 
3. True solutions to (S) are uncomputable. 

In the conversation I bring up the following questions:

• What is the meaning of 1 if true solutions cannot be computed and compared to experiments?
• What is the scientific meaning of 2?
• How can one computed approximate solution to (S) be viewed to be closer to the true solution than another, when convergence to a true solution is not computable?

I get no convincing arguments. In view of Ockham's razor it seems to me that (F) serves no role in evaluating an approximate solution to (S) for some specific experiment. 

In fact, in practice an approximate solution with better match to experiment is viewed to be better, but it cannot be determined if it is also gives better match with the true solution, since this is uncomputable. It could well be that some approximate solution gives better match with experiment than the true solution.

(F) thus emerges as a self full-filling prophecy without scientific substance. What do you think? Do you confess to (F), and if so why? If not, RealQM may be of interest to you.

The above considerations in particular apply to quantum chemistry postulated to reduce to (S) while relying on a veritable zoo of approximate solutions and the true solution safely hidden.  

Is there any possible negative aspect of adopting (F) as a fundamental belief, or is it a luxury/safety guard that we can safely enjoy? Yes, there is. If (F) is viewed as the ultimate truth of e g quantum chemistry, then a search for some alternative to (S) can be dismissed without even trying and that has been the case all along since 1926. RealQM presents (S) in new computable form.  

The reason that (S) is uncomputable is that it involves 3N spatial dimensions for a system with N electrons, which makes it an unphysical model. The generalisation of (S) for N=1 to N>1 was made by formally adding new spatial dimension for each additional electron as a purely formal mathematical generalisation without physics. RealQM offers a different generalisation staying within physical 3 spatial dimensions with physical meaning. 

The idea that formal mathematics can reveal deep insights into physics is a working hypothesis of a physicist. It was fruitful in Newtonian mechanics but seems to have led astray in modern physics with (S) a too easy catch. 

 

chatGPT conversation.