I want to do this for my own sake as much as for others’. So, I want to write something about the space of credible answers to Q, and especially Q1, that humans can currently conceive. Q1 therefore stands, to me at least, as the more mysterious of the two questions. I could spend half a semester teaching theorems that admittedly don’t answer Q2, as satisfyingly as Einstein answered the question “why the Lorentz transformations?,” but that at least render this particular set of mathematical choices (the 2-norm, the Born Rule, complex numbers, etc.) orders-of-magnitude less surprising than one might’ve thought they were a priori. Q2: Assuming classical physics wasn’t good enough for whatever reason, why this specific alternative? Why the complex-valued amplitudes? Why unitary transformations? Why the Born rule? Why the tensor product?ĭespite its greater specificity, Q2 is ironically the question that I feel we have a better handle on. ![]() Q1: Why didn’t God just make the universe classical and be done with it? What would’ve been wrong with that choice? If you want, you can divide Q into two subquestions: Q: Why should the universe have been quantum-mechanical? I’m feeling a strong compulsion to write an essay, or possibly even a book, surveying and critically evaluating a century of ideas about the following question:
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