I wrote the followong with plans of throwing it on to some physics forums I know. Perhaps some of you could critique it and see if there are anything I need to state better or which is a bit unclear in how i've stated it.
Cheers
Cheers
After thinking about this and seeing the kind of shenanigans quantum mechanics gets up to I am beginning to wonder if QM is simply the cosmic genie, that atheists use instead of God, to conjure up the universe. Whilst QM, with its associated mathematical tools, is excellent in its ability to agree with experiment, I think QM invokes its cosmic genie of "Heisenberg Uncertainty" way too often. In fact it appears that Heisenberg Uncertainty can be used to "trump" all the known laws of physics as long as it does it only for a very short period of time. That means that "elephants with straw hats" could be winking in and out of existence on Alpha Centauri as long as we say it only happens for very brief moments. I ask you is this science or superstition masquerading as science?
I believe this is the reason why QM is so popular in the big Bang. You can magically invoke any physical phenomena you like as long as you limit it to short periods of time. Seeing that so much attention has gone into mathematically modelling the very early stages of the universe, like within the first second, its no wonder they seized on their pandoras quantum box and their magic wand of Heisenberg uncertainty.
One of the areas where QM runs into problems is in reaching a grand unification theory with gravity. The grand unification theory, is an attempt by physicists, to find the common physical process that is responsible for creating all the forces of nature we see today. That is the gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, nuclear forces and the weak interaction forces. Try as they might they cannot find that first force, that parent force if you will, that is responsible for the existence of all the others.
Its interesting in that following many of the arguments on reaching a grand unification theory it is assumed that the Einstein's general relativity theory of gravity needs to be fixed to work more in accordance with quantum mechanics. Yet how do we know this is the correct approach? Why does gravity need to be "fixed"? Maybe QM needs to be fixed to work better with gravity.
Personally I think they are looking in completely the wrong direction but, well, I guess thats just me.
It is my belief that mathematics should not be used as a magic wand. It is simply a tool to model the known physical universe. Applying mathematics without some knowledge of what physical processes are being modelled is only going to result in mathematical nonsense. In particular I refer to the practice of predicting quantum measurements with Hermitian matrices, eigenvectors, eigenvalues and the Dirac notation. No one seems to know what they are modelling, they simply say "Hey, it works!" Thats all very well but how do you know your mathematical model is correct. There are many ways to fit equations to known data, it doesn't follow that all of them are good representations of reality.
I would like to suggest that QM is simply the "sticky tape and string" that cosmologists are trying to hold the universe together with.
Thoughts anyone?