Doubling Down in Physics

The technique of doubling down in poker when you have a bad hand by raising the bet to avoid being called, sometimes works but is risky. 

The technique can be used in many other settings, for example if you find that your scientific theory meets questions which you cannot answer: Make the theory twice as complicated and hope that the new questions will take time to be formulated. This way you gain time by shifting focus from the old questions without answers to new questions yet to be formulated. 

Einstein used this technique to inflate his Special Theory of Relativity posing many questions he could not answer, to his General Theory of Relativity so complicated that questioning was beyond human capacities. 

Quantum Mechanics QM (1920s) was from start troubled with foundational questions about physical meaning which had no answers, and so was expanded to Quantum Electro Dynamics QED (1940s-) , Quantum Field Theory QFT (1960s-) into String Theory (1980s-) in an ever increasing theoretical abstraction away from physical reality impossible to question. (This is as the root cause of the present crisis of modern physics). 

The result is that today all the foundational questions about QM still remain, all connecting to the basic question of the physical meaning of the (complex-valued) wave function $\Psi (X,t)$ as the subject of QM. The text-book answer to this question takes the form attributed to the Bohr-Born-Heisenberg Copenhagen Interpretation, where $X$ collects all coordinates of all electron positions: 

• $\vert\Psi (X,t)\vert^2$ is the probability density of the electron configuration $X$ at time $t$.

Here an electron is assumed to be a point particle with position identified by a 3d spatial coordinate. The multi-d spatial coordinate $X$ thus contains the positions of all electrons as point particles. The trouble with this definition is that electrons are not physical point particles with positions possible to collect in a multi-d spatial coordinate $X$. This means that the above probabilistic meaning of the wave function, makes as little sense as electron point configuration given by $X$. 

Here a physicist will come in with objective to save the game by confusing the mind of the critic by the following arguments: The wave function 

• encodes possibilities, not realities,
• represents our knowledge or information about a quantum system — not the system itself,
• is a catalog of our expectations, not a real wave.
• guides point particles.
• is real and collapses.

These are all attempts of doubling down by inventing a new language hiding the principal difficulty and then using the new language to meet questioning criticism.

There is an alternative to QM in the form of RealQM with wave function representing a collection of non-overlapping electron densities sharing a 3d spatial coordinate, and as such having a clear physical meaning:

• The wave function of QM has no physical meaning.
• The wave function of RealQM has a direct physical meaning.

A physical science theory without physical meaning will in the long run loose credibility, and this is what today takes the form of a crisis of modern theoretical physics. How will the crisis be resolved?