If you are not confused by quantum mechanics, then you haven’t really understood it.
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.
Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought independently of its being observed.
On principle it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.
Physicists must consider none but observable magnitudes while trying to solve the atomic puzzle.
I do not need to answer such questions because you cannot ask such a question experimentally.
Evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects.
There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
One should no more rack one’s brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the oint of a needle.
Absolutely not! Quantum mechanics does not describe nature. It describes what we can say about nature.
Yes, of course. Quantum mechanics tells us what atomic and subatomic particles are really like. They are fields of potentiality that become actual when measured.
The Schrödinger wave equation determines the wave function at any later time. If observers and their measuring apparatus are themselves described by a deterministic wave function, why can we not predict precise results for measurements, but only probabilities? As a general question: How can one establish a correspondence between quantum and classical reality?
Wouldn’t be better to propose that the collapse is produced by the mind/consciousness of the observer?
Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it! We compel the electron to assume a definite position; previously it was, in general, neither here nor there; it had not yet made its decision for a definite position…. Every observation is not only a disturbance; it is an incisive encroachment into the field of observation: ‘we ourselves produce the results of measurement.’
We can no longer speak of the behavior of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor is it any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively. Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analyzing, explaining, and classifying has become conscious of its limitations. Method and object can no longer be separated.
