Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

37.11. SIR ROGER PENROSE 173
37.11 Sir Roger Penrose
• Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of
things that could not be explained before ...but it doesn’t make any
sense, and there is a simple reason: It should describe the world in
a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t. The biggest figures in
quantum mechanics, Schrdinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac, were all
quantum skeptics in a sense. I blame quantum mechanics, for increasingly
fantastical theoretical physics, because people say, Well, quantum
mechanics is so nonintuitive; if you believe that, you can believe anything
that is non intuitive. When physicists finally understand the core
of quantum physics, I think it will be a beautiful theory. (Sir Roger
Penrose in Princeton Lecture 2003
• Can it really be true that Einstein, in any significant sense, was so profoundly
“wrong” as the followers of Bohr maintain? I do not believe
so. I would, myself, side strongly with Einstein in his belief in a submicroscopic
reality, and with his conviction that present-day quantum
mechanics is fundamentally incomplete.
37.12 Murray Gell-Mann NP in Physics 1969
• Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking
that the job of interpreting quantum theory was done 50 years ago.
37.13 Various Voices
• For Bohr, complementarity was an almost religious belief that the paradoxes
of the quantum world must be accepted as fundamental, not to
be “solved” or trivialized by attempts to find out “whats really going
on down there.” Bohr used the word in an unusual way: the “complementarity”
‘of waves and particles, for example (or of position and
momentum), meant that when one existed fully, its complement did not
exist at all (Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement).