The Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics About（量子力学的悖论）.pdf

The Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics1 The early successes of physics, starting with the work of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, and continuing up to the beginning of the twentieth century, dealt primarily with things that were at least large enough to see and handle. This is the world of our intuition and common sense. Everyone who has learned to play billiards, for example, knows instinctively the Newtonian concepts of force, impulse, momentum, and energy. He or she may not be able to express these ideas mathematically, but in fact the equations only express in a quantitative mathematical way those things that every billiard player knows intuitively and physiologically. The physics of things that are very small, on the other hand, such as atoms, molecules and elementary particles, was developed more recently starting with the work of Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and others during the 1920’s. We call this body of theory quantum mechanics; and by now it has been verified in so many ways that its validity is virtually beyond question. At least as a paradigm for doing precise numerical calculations that can be tested experimentally, quantum mechanics is as accurate and unambiguous as any man made theory is ever likely to be. There is no controversy about this; but when we ask just what this theory is telling us about the ultimate nature of reality, the answers are so strange and counterintuitive that physicists have been arguing about them without any consensus ever since the first principles were formulated almost eighty years ago. Part of the difficulty is that, almost by definition, quantum mechanics deals with things that we cannot see and handle. All the intuition and habits of thought with which evolution has