Am I the only one who is bothered by quantum mechanics being referred to as "spooky"?

Quantum mechanics is very strange but I dislike words like "spooky" or "mysterious" because they seem to have woo-y connotations to me. Anybody else feel this way?

(July 16, 2020 at 6:53 am)ModusPonens1 Wrote: Am I the only one who is bothered by quantum mechanics being referred to as "spooky"?

Quantum mechanics is very strange but I dislike words like "spooky" or "mysterious" because they seem to have woo-y connotations to me. Anybody else feel this way?

Well, it is, of course, a play off of Einstein's criticism of 'spooky action at a distance' in reference to entanglement.

But there is certainly *way* to much woo associated with QM. There *is* a lot strange in it, but mostly because of those attempting to understand it in terms of classical concepts.

This is backwards: we explain the old ideas in terms of the new not the other way around. QM is the new set of ideas that works better than the old, classical ideas.

(July 16, 2020 at 7:47 am)polymath257 Wrote: [...]we explain the old ideas in terms of the new not the other way around. QM is the new set of ideas that works better than the old, classical ideas.

Newtonian physics still works for baseball. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are false only insofar as they are incomplete. Quantum Physics offers deeper truths that are more complete but if you're going to figure out the trajectory of a baseball ... doing quantum calculations is probably overkill, no?

(July 16, 2020 at 12:00 pm)ModusPonens1 Wrote:

(July 16, 2020 at 7:47 am)polymath257 Wrote: [...]we explain the old ideas in terms of the new not the other way around. QM is the new set of ideas that works better than the old, classical ideas.

Newtonian physics still works for baseball.  Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are false only insofar as they are incomplete. Quantum Physics offers deeper truths that are more complete but if you're going to figure out the trajectory of a baseball ... doing quantum calculations is probably overkill, no?

Of course. Once again, the behavior is ultimately based on QM, but, because the classical world can be explained in terms of the quantum, we can use Newtonian physics as an excellent approximation (as long as hbar is small compared to anything in the situation).

In the same way, using general relativity for the motion of that baseball is overkill: the Newtonian approximation is quite sufficient.

But, when dealing with the double slit experiment, the quantum eraser, or the Aspect experiment, the Newtonian approximation fails miserably.

@polymath257

Ahhhhhh so you meant that it's all ontologically fundamentally based on QM but plenty of things can still be understood epistemologically, in physics, in non-quantum terms.

Understood.

Have they proven that QM is not woo yet? :-)

Science doesn't deal with proof. But basically yes.

Phew. :-)

(July 16, 2020 at 4:12 pm)Little lunch Wrote: Have they proven that QM is not woo yet? :-)

Given that it makes predictions that can be verified by observation and that those predictions are accurate, in some cases to over 10 decimal places of accuracy, yes.

And it was known 80 years ago that it is not woo.

The problems come when people try to make it all mystical. But the problem is the people doing that, not the subject itself.

But we still don't understand the most fundamental reason why the waveform collapses when measured