Quantum mechanics versus both common sense and tradition in science

Prehistory: Niels Bohr’s sentences: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which

divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough,"(1) commenting Wolfgang Pauli’s presentation in 1958, can serve as the slogan of quantum mechanics. Many features of quantum mechanics seem to be not only counterintuitive, i.e. opposed to common sense, but even opposed to all scientific tradition before it: for example, indeterminism, its probabilistic (Max Born’s) interpretation, freedom for many interpretations including the many-worlds interpretation (Everett III, Weeler, etc.), the inseparability of the apparatus and quantum object, observer’s involvement in measurement and thus: in its kind of scientific objectivity; duality and complementarity, entanglement, quantum information as the base of all physical processes; the universe seen as a quantum computer; an option for identifying model and reality, and too many others.

Problem: Why does quantum mechanics need “crazy enough theories”, i.e. why is the enough opposition to both common sense and tradition in science a necessary condition for its hypotheses to be true?

Thesis: Quantum mechanics is forced to a “quantum leap” to common sense and even to tradition in

science by studying quantum leaps in mechanical and physical motion, and thus by the necessity to

correspond with its subject and object. In other words, both common sense and scientific tradition share with classical mechanics and physics the postulate of continuous motion, which is inconsistent to the Planck constant, and thus to the discreteness of motion investigated by quantum mechanics.

Arguments:

1. Quantum mechanics involves holism and inseparability of knowledge and reality. Thus if quantum

leaps are what is studied, the study itself has to share similar discreteness.

2. The inseparability of knowledge and reality in quantum mechanics is not to be understood as a loose analogy or metaphor. The theorems about the absence of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (2) deduced it rigorously by its mathematical formalism.

3. The forecast thus phenomena (3) are experimentally corroborated by many, many experiments (4).

4. The conceptions of entanglement, quantum correlations and information implied by that inseparability underlie the contemporary quantum mechanics.

Conclusion: The opposition of quantum mechanics to common sense and tradition in science is

conditioned ontologically for the special kind of holistic ontology implicitly involved by it. It is not a kind of psychological perception for the accelerated development or the change of “paradigms” as in some other sciences.

Footnotes:
1 Cit. in: J. F. Dyson (1958) “Innovations in physics,” Scientific American, 199(3), 74-82, p. 80.
2 J. Neumann (1932) Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, Springer, 167-170.
S. Kochen, E. Specker (1968) “The problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics,” Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics, 17(1): 59-87.
3 J. Bell (1964) “On the Einstein ‒ Podolsky ‒ Rosen paradox,” Physics (New York), 1(3): 195-200.
4 A. Aspect, R. Grangier, G. Roger (1981) “Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem”, Physical Review Letters, 47(7): 460-463.