Science often proceeds one grave at a time

I just finished this tremendously readable and provocative book: Escape from Shadow Physics. The book is about foundations of quantum mechanics. To be precise, it’s about why we should not give up on trying to find a deeper theory of quantum mechanics. The usual story in QM is that the theory is complete and the probabilistic nature of our measurements is just the way nature is. Einstein famously rebelled against this, and didn’t accept it even until his death. Believe it or not, this attitude of his — “God does not play dice” — is in minority today. Most of the modern physicists believe that QM is complete, and that at the micro level reality is simply probabilistic when you make observations. In other words, there’s no deeper explanation to why we get statistical outcomes in QM experiments. Of course, this is so deeply unintuitive that there’s a cottage industry of interpretations for why is this the case. From multiverse to consciousness collapsing the wave function to multiple…