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Bernard d’Espagnat. I am very happy to welcome you here, to this new working group entitled “Contributions of modern physics to the theory of knowledge” which you have all kindly agreed to participate in.
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References
Richard P. Feyman, Robert B. Leighton & Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1964, volume III: Quantum Mechanics.
See Feyman’s exceptional book entitled QED (i.e. Quantum Electrodynamics); it is not technical and contains no equations. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1985.
Large Hadron Collider, at CERN.
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky & Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”, Phys. Rev., vol. 47, 1935, p. 777–780.
“On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox”, Physics, 1(3), 1964, p. 195–200.
Comment added following an exchange with Bernard d’Espagnat and Franck Laloë: This situation is nonetheless not sufficient to explain the “strangeness” of quantum mechanics: we could qualitatively reproduce by thought-experiment the same strangeness in another representation mentioned further on where spins are described by hidden variables. Only qualitative considerations derived from Bell’s inequality enable the EPR experiment to differentiate between quantum mechanics and local theories of hidden variables (to be precise, let us call thus any hidden variable theory, unlike that of David Bohm, that does not subject the variables in question to influences having effects at a distance).
See 5.
John F. Clauser et al., “Proposed experiment to test local hidden-variable theories”. Phys. Rev. Lett., 23, 1969, p. 880–884.
Alain Aspect et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 47, 460 (1981); 49, 91 (1982); 49, 1804 (1982).
Initial idea by Greenberger, Horne, Zeilinger, 1989, realization in 1998 by Bouwmesteer et al.
These three physicists are the founders of quantum electrodynamics (QED).
On this theme, see Leonard Susskind’s book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
Comment added during proofreading: To my mind, Bohm’s mechanics does not provide an “intuitive” framework: it is completely non-local. Furthermore, as a minute example, when a wave function is real, the particle piloted by the wave is immobile: therefore, an electron in the fundamental state of a hydrogen atom is immobile – which, in my opinion, is a strange representation of the electronic orbital.
Bernard d’Espagnat (ed.), Implications philosophiques de la science contemporaine, tome 2, PUF, 2002.
Specialist in the philosophy of cosmology.
Craig Venter is a pioneer in synthetic biology.
Extended object of string theory.
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Brézin, É. (2017). The Inescapable Strangeness of the Quantum World. In: d'Espagnat, B., Zwirn, H. (eds) The Quantum World. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55420-4_1
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