Quantum mechanics makes no sense because the heuristics used to teach quantum mechanics lack nuance.
The double-slit experiment is taught as an example of how weird quantum mechanics is, but it isn’t weird if you know a simple trick.
If you don’t disturb the path of the electron, it goes through two slits, but if you do disturb it, it will only go through one slit but this is only weird if you don’t imagine the electron as a vortex with a wake. The vortex has to slow down a bit when it encounters the electromagnetic fields of the slits, but the wake keeps going. This causes the vortex to ride on the wake as it travels through the slits. This is why when you disturb the wave-like path of the wake, you force the particle-like path of the electron to behave in a more particle-like fashion.
Another example is entanglement.
If you measure the spin of one particle, it determines the spin of another particle, even if the particles are far apart.
This is only weird if you don’t understand the concept of object permanence. If a red marble and a green marble are in a bag and you take out a green marble, you can be certain that the marble in the bag is red. Entangled particles are like this because when they are ‘born’ they are automatically opposites and they remain opposites as long as they are not disturbed. This only doesn’t make sense if you do not understand that there are initial conditions about which you do not and cannot know.
Quantum mechanics will insist that this issue is more complicated than the difference between red and green marbles because of the difference between classical and quantum probability statistics.
But this only seems mysterious if you don’t understand that the difference between the two results occurs because a quantum system exists in a non-inertial (shaking) reference frame. You wouldn’t expect the results of two experiments to match if one was performed on a stationary table and the other was performed on a vibrating table, would you? So why are students taught to expect quantum systems to behave as though they exist in a stationary reference frame? That isn’t what the quantum math of Hilbert space tells us.
There are so many examples of poor heuristics in quantum mechanics that I can’t think of all of them right now.
- Spin is an abstract concept with no physical analog. Really?
- The electron cannot orbit around a nucleus because the math tells us that is impossible. Really?
- The Pauli exclusion principle or electron degeneracy pressure or zero point energy or whatever you want to call the quantum vacuum is an abstract concept with no physical analog. Really?
- The meaning of the fine structure constant and of Planck’s constant are mysterious. Really?
- Interpretations of entanglement that require determinism are ruled out. Really?
- Planck’s constant is not a derived quantity. Really?
- Quantum mechanics tells us nothing about free will. Really?
I’ve addressed these issues in short form in the links above and I’ve compiled that material into a longer form in these articles:
Disentanglement, An Exclusion Principle, and Imagining an Atom
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I first posted this material on Quora.com and the title of this post was inspired by a friend who entitled one of his blog posts “Nuance is Continuous”. This led me to think about how engineers and physicists make approximations of physical systems by quantizing continuous things all of the time, yet we don’t create a dramatic interpretation of these approximations claiming to have explained the basic building blocks of reality. That would be silly, yet when we mystify quantized behavior of systems within the narrative of modern physics and quantum mechanics, we confuse the map and the territory.
In a broader, cultural context, the world blurs out at times and pops with photorealistic precision at others. Is this ebb and flow of artistic or intellectual expression reflective of an ebb and flow occurring within our minds as the cycles of war and peace influence the mental resources we must dedicate to processing trauma. When your mind is overloaded with trauma, must you reduce your attention to visual detail and approximate the images around your with more cartoonish, blurry, or geometrical shapes? The world wars and the atomic bomb were quite traumatic for the physics community.
Kirsten Hacker 