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Quantum mechanics is one in every of mankind's so much striking highbrow achievements. Stunningly profitable and chic, it demanding situations our private intuitions in regards to the international. during this publication, seventeen physicists and philosophers, all deeply involved in knowing quantum mechanics, respond to Schlosshauer's penetrating questions about the crucial concerns. They furnish us an intimate examine their appreciably alternative ways of creating experience of the theory's strangeness. what's quantum mechanics approximately? what's it telling us approximately nature? Can quantum info or new experiments support carry the fog? And the place are we headed subsequent? all people attracted to the modern yet frequently longstanding conundrums of quantum thought, no matter if lay reader or professional, will locate a lot foodstuff for notion in those pages. A wealth of non-public reflections and anecdotes warrantly an attractive learn.

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So I read large fragments of the Lectures. I thought that Feynman’s discussion of the double-slit experiment was fascinating. I also took an excellent course on quantum mechanics when I was a student at Kraków’s Technical University in the section of nuclear physics. ere were just seven students taking our class, and so the teacher (Professor Guła) decided to go for it. It was a very advanced and personalized course. , I recognized a similarity between Guła’s approach and Dirac’s Quantum eory. I also listened to lectures at Jagiellonian University, whose physics department was across the street from the Technical University.

John Bell was interviewed talking about his theorem proving that quantum theory is nonlocal. Alain Aspect talked about his experiment to test Bell’s inequalities. David Deutsch talked about the many-worlds interpretation, David Bohm and Basil Hiley discussed the pilot-wave interpretation, Rudolf Peierls and John Wheeler advanced versions of the Copenhagen interpretation, and John Taylor promoted the ensemble interpretation. At the time, these names were unknown to me. I have since met some of them.

I immediately concluded that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality was incomplete, and I made a note to think about completing it when I got tired of the serious pursuits my teachers had set me on. (After my oral qualifying exam, Roy Glauber advised me to stop spending so much time with Gordon Baym. ) More than two decades later, in , fteen years after John Bell’s now-famous paper appeared, I learned about Bell’s theorem through the pages of the Scienti c American. I believe Tony Leggett had tried to tell me about it a few years earlier, but I was too busy with real physics to pay attention.

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