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[Podcast] 63 | Solo: Finding Gravity Within Quantum Mechanics – Sean Carroll
(www.preposterousuniverse.com)
Personal anecdote: While physics has been a subject of interest to me for a long time, I only recently took a real interest in quantum physics. A big reason for that, I think, is the way it is taught and communicated. It's presented as something mystical, unknowable, "sort of like [analogy], but like, nothing like that at the same time". The obvious example is how electron orbits are portrayed "sort of like planetary orbits except they don't work like planets and they're not really orbits". Another example is the "collapse of the wave function", which is presented as some sort of 'process' where the laws of physics appear to suddenly cease evolving according to the Shrödinger equation and begin displaying properties associated with classical mechanics. This is all very unfortunate and damaging to the public perception of fundamental physics.
(Then there is the apparent ad-hoc appearance of the Standard Model, which is not really even trying to explain how anything makes sense - it's just a collection of mathematical formulas and numbers that always seem to predict experimental outcomes - and that gives the impression that we have absolutely no idea what's really going on. So that doesn't help.)
Sean Carroll is one of the very few science communicators I've come across that actually takes a more careful approach to these issues. He tries to separate conjecture from observed facts and strip quantum physics down to the essence of what makes something quantum. And it's fascinating! Reality may be fundamentally different from how we experience it, but it isn't inexplicable. We can explain quantum systems in ways that are consistent and intuitive once you accept the rules. We just don't know what kind of theory accurately describes everything we observe.