What Is Real?
Adam Becker
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Preface
- The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling. —Ursula K. Le Guin #7263 •
- The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization. —Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" #7252 •
Introduction
- Quantum physics works, but ignoring what it tells us about reality means papering over a hole in our understanding of the world—and ignoring a larger story about science as a human process. Specifically, it ignores a story about failure: a failure to think across disciplines, a failure to insulate scientific pursuits from the corrupting influence of big money and military contracts, and a failure to live up to the ideals of the scientific method. #7250 •
Chapter 1
- Except that's not quite true either. Once you do find that electron, a funny thing happens to its wave function. Rather than following the Schrödinger equation like a good wave function, it collapses—it instantly becomes zero everywhere except in the place where you found the electron. Somehow, the laws of physics seem to behave differently when you make a measurement: the Schrödinger equation holds all the time, except when you make a measurement, at which point the Schrödinger equation is temporarily suspended and the wave function collapses everywhere except a random point. This is so weird that it gets a special name: the measurement problem #7261 •