The alt text perfectly describes how I feel about quantum mechanics. I get it on the surface but the farther down i drill into it the more confused I get. Nothing exists.
Of course you do. At high energy levels, the small effects cancel out. You've got dozens to thousands of GeV of kinetic energy, the 1 GeV of mass in the proton is all but a rounding error. The really weird stuff happens at low energy levels, where the details actually matter.
It's kinda the opposite of relativity, which converges to to something mundane at low velocities, but things go off the deep end at high velocities.
I tend to think of it in the context that our ability to directly observe anything at that scale is limited, so while we can record and observe effects, our knowledge of the processes that lead to them is sparser. It’s like having a low-resolution image of someone’s face— you can tell what it is, but without a clearer picture, you have a harder time with the who.
The how of things exists, we just lack the ability to see it yet(unless, of course, the universe is exactly that strange)
I’ve got a degree in the subject, and I still often feel the same way. Quantum mechanics works outside what our savannah running monkey brains can handle. The best we can do is trust the maths and approximate as best we can. We’ll regularly break those approximations however, and get thoughly flummoxed.
Depending on what exactly you mean, you might be onto something referred to as structural realism in the philosophy of science. Citing from the intro of the wikipedia article:
In the philosophy of science, structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves.
For those who want to read more, there is also an article on the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and books like “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized” by James Ladyman and Don Ross (2007) or “How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?” by Sunny Auyang (1995).
In particular, your “nothing exists” reminds me of this in “Every Thing Must Go”:
a first approximation to our metaphysics is: ‘There are no things. Structure is all there is.’
I wish binky79 from digg would show up and say that this is the best xkcd ever. Recently moved here from reddit so I thought it would be nice if we went full circle for a minute.
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