This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.

Hello! You may have been directed to this page because you said something along the lines of "Quantum physics shows that reality doesn't exist apart from our observation of it," or "Science has disproved the idea of an objective reality," or even just "Quantum physics is one of the great mysteries of modern science; no one understands how it works."

There was a time, roughly the first half-century after quantum physics was invented, when this was more or less true. Certainly, when quantum physics was just being discovered, scientists were very confused indeed! But time passed, and science moved on. If you're confused about a phenomenon, that's a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself - there are mysterious questions, but not mysterious answers. Science eventually figured out what was going on, and why things looked so strange at first.

The series of posts indexed below will show you - not just tell you - what's really going on down there. To be honest, you're not going to be able to follow this if algebra scares you. But there won't be any calculus, either.

Some optional preliminaries you might want to read:

Reductionism: We build models of the universe that have many different levels of description. But so far as anyone has been able to determine, the universe itself has only the single level of fundamental physics - reality doesn't explicitly compute protons, only quarks.
Joy in the Merely Real: If you can't take joy in things that turn out to be explicable, you're going to set yourself up for eternal disappointment. Don't worry if quantum physics turns out to be normal.

And here's the main sequence:

Quantum Explanations: Quantum mechanics doesn't deserve its fearsome reputation. If you tell people something is supposed to be mysterious, they won't understand it. It's human intuitions that are "strange" or "weird"; physics itself is perfectly normal. Talking about historical erroneous concepts like "particles" or "waves" is just asking to confuse people; present the real, unified quantum physics straight out.
Configurations and Amplitude: A preliminary glimpse at the stuff reality is made of.

...

John_Thomas

John_Thomas

John_Thomas

John_Thomas