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> Furthermore, plenty of physicists don't actually grasp the fundamentals of their own field - they specialise a lot and can use specialised theories to get wha

> Furthermore, plenty of physicists don't actually grasp the fundamentals of their own field - they specialise a lot and can use specialised theories to get what they need done without understanding in detail where it came from. This. Sometimes physics does feel like a religion. The fundamentals (including basic assumptions and "proofs" that are complete bs in the mathematical sense) are getting reiterated time and again till people actually start believing in them. From what I've experienced myself it basically works like this: In the beginning, you come across some claim or fundamental assumption you can't follow and make a mental note to follow up on it and sit down to fully understand it. Then you get sidetracked and next time you come across said claim, you're like "Damn, I wanted to look that up!" and here you are, making a mental note again… Now somewhere between the fifth and tenth time this happens, you've forgotten about your mental note completely and have just accepted the claim as fact. It's basically the brain tricking you into thinking the claim is correct, the more often you read about it. It's like habitual behavior you don't actually process consciously anymore.

doubleunplussed 10y ago
I completely agree, and I would say that's probably the historical origin of the Copenhagen interpretation. It was clearly initially a note-to-self that something wasn't right and required figuring out, and somewhere along the line that confusion became an axiom that later generations just accepted, not getting the message that it was unfinished. Physicists aren't dumb, but they just haven't looked into it more because it's surprisingly not relevant to the majority of work. So they're just repeating the confusion of past generations as if it's fact. But, particularly in my field, we're getting seriously good at manipulating more and more exotic quantum states. I'm working on things involving 'weak' measurement, where you really need to know what counts as a measurement or not, and how much - you can do a partial measurement and only partly (appear to) collapse a wavefunction. These types of experiments are becoming more are more common, and it's happened a few times now that I've heard people saying "hang on, what counts as a measurement in this context?" and then having to read a decoherence textbook in order to do their atomic physics. With these sorts of things as well as quantum computers, decoherence and the measurement problem is intruding into a larger proportion of people's work, which means repeating the mantra of the previous generation isn't going to cut it anymore, people are going to actually read decoherence textbooks and decide for themselves.

doubleunplussed 10y ago

I completely agree, and I would say that's probably the historical origin of the Copenhagen interpretation. It was clearly initially a note-to-self that something wasn't right and required figuring out, and somewhere along the line that confusion became an axiom that later generations just accepted, not getting the message that it was unfinished. Physicists aren't dumb, but they just haven't looked into it more because it's surprisingly not relevant to the majority of work. So they're just repeating the confusion of past generations as if it's fact. But, particularly in my field, we're getting seriously good at manipulating more and more exotic quantum states. I'm working on things involving 'weak' measurement, where you really need to know what counts as a measurement or not, and how much - you can do a partial measurement and only partly (appear to) collapse a wavefunction. These types of experiments are becoming more are more common, and it's happened a few times now that I've heard people saying "hang on, what counts as a measurement in this context?" and then having to read a decoherence textbook in order to do their atomic physics. With these sorts of things as well as quantum computers, decoherence and the measurement problem is intruding into a larger proportion of people's work, which means repeating the mantra of the previous generation isn't going to cut it anymore, people are going to actually read decoherence textbooks and decide for themselves.