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1 Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics 1 . 1 Quantum Blues
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Feynman, Who Won Richard |
| Abstract | who won the Nobel prize in physics in 1965, is often quoted as saying that nobody understands quantum mechanics: 1 There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper, a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.. .. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. What is the theory of relativity about? Even non-physicists are likely to say that it's about space and time. The notion of space as a sort of universal three-dimensional arena in which events take place, and time as the ticking of a universal clock, turns out to be wrong. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, 2 space and time depend on the state of motion of a system and so are different for Alice on a flight to Rome and Bob on a train to New York, and quite a lot different for neutrinos moving at light speed. Hermann Minkowski, Einstein's former mathematics professor, showed that space and time in special relativity can be represented by a four-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry and predicted that 'space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.' 3 General relativity goes further and treats gravity as the bending of space-time, so objects falling under the influence of gravity move by following the curvature of space-time. One might think that the idea of space and time fading away into 'mere shadows' relative to some sort of merging of the two notions is pretty wild and not that easy to … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://blog.umd.edu/phil858/files/2015/09/Bananaworld-Chap1-191kkut.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
