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Surveying the Attitudes of Physicists Concerning Foundational Issues of Quantum Mechanics

Sujeevan Sivasundaram, Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen

2016 · arXiv

Physics
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From the abstract

Even though quantum mechanics has existed for almost 100 years, questions concerning the foundation and interpretation of the theory still remain. These issues have gathered more attention in recent years, but does this mean that physicists are more aware of foundational issues concerning quantum mechanics? A survey was sent out to 1234 physicists affiliated to 8 different universities. 149 responded to the questions, which both concerned foundational issues related to quantum mechanics, specifically, as well as questions concerning interpretations of physical theories in general. The answers to the survey revealed that foundational concepts in quantum mechanics are still a topic that only a minority of physicists are familiar with, although a clear majority of physicists find that interpretations of physical theories are important. The various questions, as well as how the respondents answered, are presented. The survey intends to give an overview of what the opinion of the physics community, in general, is concerning issues related to quantum mechanics.

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naasking
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See here for one of the surveys I mentioned: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00676 To "What is the message of the observed violations of Bell's inequality?", a whopping 37% believed that it ruled out hidden variables entirely, even though Bohmian mechanics has been a thing since the the 1950s. 21% said Bohmian mechanics was explicitly incompatible with Bell's theorem in answering the question "What are your reasons for NOT favoring De Broglie - Bohm theory?", which is clear nonsense. There's still a lot of confusion about quantum foundations, even among physicists. The fight over superdeterminism has only just begun, even though de Broglie's "double solution" to QM has been…
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around for almost a century as the first superdeterministic theory. And this is ironic given GR is a theory of deterministic evolution of objects over a 4D manifold, eg. the future is already written, but taking this same approach to QM is heresy, even though this would provide some conceptual unity that might bear fruits towards unification.
Original comment When Bohr got it wrong: the impact of a little-known paper on quantum theory
parenthephobia
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> Quantum uncertainty is a fundamental consequence of the underlying physics, it has nothing to do with influence from the measurement process. If you can prove that, your Nobel prize awaits. :) The truth is that nobody knows why there is quantum uncertainty. The common belief is that the uncertainty is "real", but non-local hidden variable theories have not been proven to be impossible. (In a recent survey of physicists, 47% favoured explicitly real uncertainty - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00676.pdf)
Original comment Atomic Spins Evade Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

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