https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/making-sense-of-quantum-mechanics/

“I might suggest something like this:

That every instance of a unity and every (possible) constellation of them into relationships of any possible form… comprise what can be understood as Hypersystems. And every real and possible hypersystem has qualities that resemble those we find and expect… in what we refer to as ‘the universe’ as if we were speaking of a singular referent. Yet the referent can be neither singular »nor multiple… it is, instead, strangely »transcendental. And it is not the qualities of this universe(s) that we derive, but rather the results of our purposes and approaches to analyzing it(they).”

— an anonymous informant

“But there is a further puzzle here – something (as it were) more fine-grained, something that it has only fairly recently occurred to people to wonder about. All of the “interpretations” I mentioned above make crucial use of something called the quantum-mechanical wave-function. And there is a question – even once we have settled on one or another of those “interpretations” – about what sorts of things quantum-mechanical wave-functions are. And various possible answers to that question have been hotly debated for 15 or 20 years now. Everybody has always agreed that the simplest and most flat-footed and most obvious way to think about what wave-functions are is to think of them as concrete physical objects. But the space that wave-functions live in, the space (that is) that we would be obliged to think of as the fundamental physical space of the world- if we want to think of wave-functions as concrete physical objects – happens to have a gigantic number of dimensions. And this has always seemed to everybody to amount to a problem. And I have lately become convinced that it is nothing of the sort. I have lately become convinced that (as a matter of fact) it is the key to the whole business. It turns out that if you imagine that the fundamental physical space of the world is something other, and larger, and different than the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, then everything that has always seemed uncanny about quantum mechanics suddenly becomes clear and straightforward and understandable and in some sense to have been expected. Anyway, that’s the work that I was thinking of in my response to your previous question.”

— David Albert

Mar 26, 2020

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