Quantum Mechanics Needs a New Theory - Sir Roger Penrose

The phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with woo. Indeed. Right? And some people, like Deepak Chopra and the like, they love to use that word. Because as soon as you use that word, you can kind of get away with almost anything afterwards. That's right. Yes, I have to say, quantum mechanics is a strange thing. And I sort of blame it for certain things. I don't want to be unfair here. I'm not saying, unless I blame it, it gives some people the impression, okay, the fact your theory doesn't make any sense, there's nothing against it. You could say crazy things. Quantum mechanics is crazy, so why don't you accept some other crazy theory? Of course, quantum mechanics has the virtue that it does agree with an awful lot of experiments. It gives you huge insights into things that one didn't have before. So just the fact that it's crazy isn't enough to make it something you should study seriously. Well, it's very, very difficult to understand, even for people who study it. Yes, indeed. So for someone like myself, I'm trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it. And it becomes a big problem. Because there's- Are there two? In one of my books, I tried to explain, there are actually two mysteries in quantum mechanics, and they get muddled. One of them is the whole subject is pretty crazy. Yes, but it's coherent, and it makes sense. And if you study it properly and you say, okay, that makes sense. And this includes things like non-local effects, where you can have two things. Now, even thousands of kilometers apart, and you can see these quantum entanglement effects. So they're still, in some sense, connected with each other, even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing. That's baffling. That's baffling, but that's part of the comprehensible part of quantum mechanics. It's muddied up because there's the other part, which has to do with this collapse of the wave function. And standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense. But people get them muddled, in my view. You think, because this doesn't make sense, and that doesn't make- Well, it's all crazy, and so anything crazy is up for grabs. But it seems to me that quantum mechanics, the things which are crazy, and they do hang together, and the theory works, and you understand that, that's fine. But the things which involve the collapse of the wave function, that's not fine because we don't have the right theory yet. That's why. It doesn't make logical sense because it's not the right theory yet. That's my view. I mean, I'm a minority in saying this. Most people who study the foundations of quantum mechanics say, well, we haven't got the right interpretation yet. We have to think what it means, and so on. They don't think, well, maybe it's not quite right. Maybe there's something, when these effects get big enough, something else comes in, and we need a new insight, a new theory. So that's what I think. Now, in something like superposition, where something can be both still and in motion at the same time, as soon as you say that to the common person like myself, my brain glazes over, and my eyebrows raise up, and I go, okay, what is- And then you're talking about entanglement, things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way that we don't totally understand or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way? Well, it does as long as you don't get to the measurement. Ah, the measurement. The entanglement part is pretty well understood. But the measurement is the problem. The measurement part is not- The puzzles about the entanglement is when you come to the measurement. You make a measurement over here, and the measurement over there, and they can be, well, now, a thousand kilometers apart. The record was only 143 or something a little while ago. But it's a long distance. But there's hardly any movement of material. So the thing that, see, in the scheme I have, which involves the collapse of the wave function, involves a certain amount of displacement of mass. Now, if it's just photons, that's light, and these experiments tend to be just light, then there's no mass displacement in the state. And so, sure, what quantum mechanics says is fine by me. Okay, it's hard to get your mind around, and I certainly agree with that. But it's logical. What's not logical comes apart about when you worry about the measurement issue and the collapse of the wave function, and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right. Yes.