# Why Quantum Mechanics is Hard to Understand

## I INTRODUCTION

There was a time when the Copenhagen Interpretation was commonly thought to have solved the conceptual problems of quantum mechanics. That view is much less fashionable now, but we do not appear to be approaching a consensus on any alternative. Most papers written on this subject start with the mathematical formalism (its predictions so thoroughly validated by experiment) and try to recast it into some new form with a natural and unambiguous physical meaning. These efforts seem to me to take us in the wrong direction — deeper into abstraction (where it is easy to mislead ourselves) and farther from the immediate empirical basis of physical concepts, which is where the difficulty lies.

I think Bohr was right, or nearly so. Unfortunately, his writings are so obscure that there is no more unanimity on “what Bohr really thought” than there is on what quantum mechanics is all about. I have tried here to follow what I take to be the spirit of Bohr’s analysis, but in language which will be clearer to physicists today. But not very clear — quantum mechanics is intrinsically hard, because it pushes us to the limits of the very idea of the physical.

Some linguists claim that the capacity for language is part of our genetic makeup. Even the grammatical structure of language is to some extent biologically determined, e.g., the distinction between nouns and verbs . Perhaps our brains also favor certain kinds of mathematical and physical concepts. The machines we design and the theorems we prove reflect the hard-wired structure of our thinking. Whether this is true or not, it is true that quantum theory startles us by distinguishing two aspects of the way we think about the physical world — two aspects we are used to describing in a single unified account: what a thing is and what a thing does. The result is that we cannot form a single consistent picture of physical reality at the quantum level based on geometrical structures in physical space and time.

When Einstein wrote his first paper on special relativity, he used mathematics already well known in contemporary research on electrodynamics. His profound and original contribution was to show how physical concepts are based on the nature and limitations of observations, and how intuitively appealing concepts like simultaneity are abstractions which may or may not apply to the real world. To understand quantum mechanics, we also have to wrestle with physical concepts. In this brief essay, I cannot treat any particular examples in detail, but I have tried to point out the crucial features of physical analysis which take on new meanings as we go from classical to quantum physics. Needless to say, my discussion here is neither as original nor as revolutionary as Einstein’s was. I have for the most part restated very old ideas in slightly new language, but hopefully new and fresh enough to encourage others to see Copenhagen in a new light.

In this paper I present the conceptual system which I think gives the clearest understanding of what it is we are doing when we use quantum mechanics. I do not specifically argue against other views, such as Bohmian mechanics or various versions of decoherence, etc. My criticisms of these ideas I reserve for possible future publications. I assume that the reader is familiar with elementary quantum mechanics, and also with some of the classic literature on conceptual issues, e.g., as collected in .

## II OBJECTS VS. THEORY

Physics (like all science) begins with physical objects, a category which is indispensable and familiar but still somehow strangely vague. Objects are things which are generally in constant interaction with their environments. We can continue to identify them through many sorts of motions and changes. We can observe them repeatedly and act on them and observe the results. Other people can observe all this along with us. Factual information about objects is in principle verifiable by anyone. Objects are persistently identifiable in this way (at least for a while), but they also change, sometimes unpredictably, sometimes in ways hard to detect or describe. Heraclitus said we cannot step into the same river twice — i.e., it is never quite the same. An object is like a river of events and appearances which we see as a persisting unity.

Objects are defined by indicating them — e.g., “That big rock over there next to the tree.” I don’t have to know everything there is to know about the rock to specify it uniquely. There may not even be a “set of all facts” about an object. Is mud caked on the side of the rock part of it, or a separate object? Objects are full of ambiguities like that which we can never completely define away. The important thing is that it can be located within the network of familiar objects and events — the history of our world. This is in contrast to the abstract entities of geometry. All the properties of an equilateral triangle are implied by its definition (given the axioms of the geometrical context in which it is considered). A physical object can always surprise us. The big rock by the tree might turn out to be a hollow prop or a heavy iron meteorite. This contingent quality of genuinely physical things can be annoying to a theorist, because it reminds us that all theoretical descriptions are necessarily approximations and simplifications. But we cannot describe the world without at some point referring to objects — it is only through them that we have a handle on the physical world. They pretty much constitute what we mean by the physical world. The continuity and verifiability of objects help us distinguish “objective” reality from fantasy.

Physical thinking begins with physical objects, but physical theory quickly builds up a very different class of concepts for dealing with phenomena (e.g., space-time, point particles, trajectories, momentum, energy, entropy). The shift is obvious in a comparison of the thinking of Aristotle and Galileo. Aristotle still focuses on objects as such and their essences, transformations, and causes. This makes him very obscure for a modern scientifically trained reader. Galileo and his successors look instead for descriptions in terms of quantifiable properties of objects, and especially quantifiable relationships between them (such as relative positions and velocities). Our beautiful and precisely tested theories of matter refer to an abstract description of phenomena which is made possible by restricting our attention to quantifiable properties. This realm of abstraction is one step removed from the concrete reality of things.

## III GEOMETRY VS. DYNAMICS

Geometrical objects are static. The mind’s eye can scan over them, making comparisons or measurements back and forth repeatedly as much as we like. The fundamental geometrical ideas are congruence and measure. Physical processes and objects are dynamical (a word which implies both change and a chain of causal links among objects). A physical event happens once and can never recur — only an event of the same type. In physics we observe the consequences of events by means of our own transient subjective experiences and by repeatable and objective reference to objects whose properties have been affected. Physical understanding means knowing how to categorize types of events and the types of causal connections which relate “typical situations” (based on observing or setting up relevant conditions and ignoring irrelevant ones) to their possible outcomes. We as observers and experimenters are not external to the physical world. All our actions are part of the web of events and causal relationships. Physical concepts are based on the dynamical properties of objects (including us).

When we are accustomed to using a particular physical theory, the process of connecting concrete objects with abstract theory seems very straightforward. The difference between those two things (concrete and abstract) is really very subtle and full of pitfalls. It is convenient to talk as if our theoretical structures were “isomorphic” to the objects out there in the world which they describe, but true isomorphism relates one mathematical entity to another. Only when a physical object can be treated like a geometrical object — e.g., a machined piece of metal which we can inspect and measure repeatedly, examining it with the physical eye in the same way the mind contemplates a geometrical figure — only then can we find something like a quantitative isomorphism. What we have then is a relation between geometrical measure and physical acts of measurement. The latter are in a sense outside of time in this case. The results we get do not depend on when we do the measurements or in what order. Usually, physical analysis is not so simple.

The static geometrical view of the physical world treats time as essentially equivalent to space, as one coordinate of a space-time in which the history of the universe exists as a single geometrical object. The units of analysis are geometrical objects — lines, areas, and volumes which indicate the trajectories of objects or the space they occupy. This simple view works at the classical level. Ultimately, however, we are forced to form our concepts on the basis of the practical units of physical analysis in a dynamical universe — interactions between objects.

## IV DYNAMICS VS. HISTORY

Suppose we could have a “complete” history of the universe — we know exactly what has happened at every point in space-time. But to say that “q” happened at point $`(𝐱,t)`$ is meaningless unless q is a member of a set of the possible things which can happen, i.e., it is an abstract property distilled from a knowledge of the range of patterns which occur in the universe as a whole. The way we sort out the whens and wheres in physics is different from the way we sort out the whats. The distinction is almost imperceptible in classical physics. A vector from my own position to the location of a planet determines the gravitational force which the planet’s mass exerts on me, but the vector also tells me where to look to find it in the sky. In quantum theory, however, it becomes clear that locations in space and time take their meaning from the concrete world of objects, but the way we categorize properties comes from dynamics. These are two irreducible aspects of physical description which evolve together — historical and dynamical.

A thing is historical insofar as it is objective (can be observed and treated as an object). It then enters into the realm of recordable objective occurrences which can be ordered in historical space and time. It is dynamical insofar as it is defined as an abstract element of a dynamical theory which explains causal relationships between objects. A quantum entity can be both (a common source of confusion). A proton is an object if we are talking about its track through a system of detectors. More often the proton concept appears as an abstract constituent of a dynamical system.

Imagine that we could see the universe as omniscient external observers, all of space and time at once, and that what we “see” is a tangle of intersecting particle world-lines (cf. Ch. 1 of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler ). We might detect some patterns which would constitute physical rules or laws in some sense, but it would be quite difficult or impossible to know whether we had found all the important patterns, or to distinguish significant relationships from accidental ones. Even more difficult would be to translate this omniscient description into the kinds of relationships and laws which would be observed by the huge clumsy bunches of world-lines which constitute ourselves.

When we set out to investigate Nature, we are not like that external omniscient observer at all. We look for relationships and patterns in the behavior of objects we know. We want to find out – does this kind of object always behave this way under these circumstances? The phrases “this kind,” “this way,” and “these circumstances” imply the ability to abstract relevant or significant features from what are really unique events. They also imply that we can find or (even better) set up many instances of these typical situations. The result is that the concepts we develop to describe physical phenomena depend not only on what we can observe, but also on what we can do.

To say that A affects or causes or influences or interacts with B implies a counterfactual: If A had been different, B would have been different, too. The most convincing way to establish a connection is to “wiggle” some parameter in A more or less randomly and then observe the same odd pattern showing up in some property of B . If I want to know whether a wall switch controls a certain light, I can flip the switch on and off and observe whether the light follows my actions. There is always the possibility that the light is being controlled by someone else or goes on and off spontaneously; but if I put the switch through a very irregular and spontaneous sequence of changes and the light still follows along, then the probability of a causal connection is very high (barring a conspiracy to deceive the experimenter).

Physical theory is possible because we are immersed and included in the whole process — because we can act on objects around us. Our ability to intervene in nature clarifies even the motion of the planets around the sun — masses so great and distances so vast that our role as participants seems insignificant. Newton was able to transform Kepler’s kinematical description of the solar system into a far more powerful dynamical theory because he added concepts from Galileo’s experimental methods — force, mass, momentum, and gravitation. The truly external observer will only get as far as Kepler. Dynamical concepts are formulated on the basis of what we can set up, control, and measure.

## V REDUCTION IS DYNAMICAL, NOT GEOMETRICAL.

Human beings are adept at contriving machines which we assemble part by part. We try to understand nature by the inverse process of dissection into component parts. Twentieth century physics has probed phenomena at ever smaller scales and we find that matter can be carved into more or less fundamental pieces — atoms and particles. These pieces are nothing like the hard bits of matter Newton or Descartes might have expected, nothing like the machined metal part I mentioned in Section III above. This should not be surprising, because physical dissection of objects is not like the intellectual dissection of geometrical entities. Machines are an exception because they are designed — they are intellectual patterns imposed on matter.

We probe matter by contriving interactions and studying dynamical patterns. The end result is not building blocks of matter, but fundamental units of interaction — quanta. An exchange of one quantum is the minimal dynamical relationship. It is the simplest way one object can interact with another.

Quantum particles are not mechanical components. In phenomena where classical approximations are appropriate, it is useful to think of atoms and particles in that way. At a finer scale, it soon becomes apparent that our mechanical concepts are not fundamental. In a sense Plank was correct to say that the electromagnetic radiation in a cavity is not composed of photons, but that they are merely the discrete units of energy which the field exchanges with its environment. The field itself is not discrete — composed of particles. It is simply “quantized.” Quantum fields are not constitutive but dynamical descriptions. They tell us not what the field is but what it can do.

## VI CONFIGURATION SPACE VS. PHYSICAL SPACE

Newtonian mechanics combines the historical and dynamical aspects of physics into one unified description. Any object is made of particles with trajectories $`𝐱_i(t)`$ (where the $`i`$ indexes the set of particles). These can be thought of as sequences of historical events (a certain particle being in a certain place at at certain time) in the concrete physical world we live in. The same numbers $`𝐱_i`$, along with inherent particle properties such as mass and charge, also determine all the forces at work in the system — i.e., the dynamics. This way of thinking about the physical world is so neat and appealing, it is natural to regard it as an ideal to which physics should conform as much as possible. It may even be difficult to imagine that a physical theory could be anything else. But the quantum method of describing phenomena is radically different.

In the familiar Schrödinger approach, we have not trajectories but a wave function $`\psi (𝐱_i,t)`$. Now the $`𝐱_i`$ are independent variables along with the time. This looks at first like a field theory, but $`\psi `$ cannot be given a realistic historical interpretation in the way that the electromagnetic field can. The $`𝐱_i`$ represent not historical space (the realm of objective events) but the configuration space of the dynamical situation we are analyzing (the possible degrees of freedom of the interaction). The space of states is the space of well-behaved complex functions on the configuration space. The wave function description presupposes a prior objective context. We partition the objective world into chunks with carefully prepared properties (e.g., source, target, and detector). The wave function represents the dynamical relationship among these objects. That is a crucial point and the most common stumbling block. The quantum “system” is usually something small — one or a few particles. The system gives us the degrees of freedom of the dynamics. But the dynamics is a causal relationship among big things — the parts of the apparatus. The quantum experimenter goes to a lot of trouble to make big things interact in small ways, so that the discreteness of the quantum of action shows up in the behavior of objects we can experience directly.

From $`\psi `$ we calculate probabilities of various responses of the detector in our experimental setup (scattering cross-sections, branching ratios, etc.). The wave function or state vector encompasses many possible outcomes, so if we try to take it out of its dynamical context and give it a historical interpretation, then we may imagine as a consequence “many worlds” or “collapse” events. This comes of confusing the configuration space with historical space.

How are these two spaces related, if they are not identical? I suggest that it is useful to think of the configuration space as something like a tangent space (a crude metaphorical use of the mathematical term). It is not tangent to a point of historical space-time, but rather is associated with a particular “dynamical partition” of the physical world, i.e., a certain way of dividing the world into objects.

A quantum state is a little like the velocity vector of a flow on a manifold. We require different tangent spaces to describe the velocity at different locations. Similarly, when we alter the conditions of an experiment or perform a measurement or otherwise gain objective information, we shift to a new dynamical partition, so that there is a discontinuity between the old state description and the new one appropriate to the new context. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Schrödinger equation is linear even though quantum transition phenomena have a nonlinear flavor — it may be (again speaking metaphorically) because the Schrödinger equation is defined on a linear tangent space rather than on the full historical manifold.

I doubt that there is a well-defined set of all possible dynamical partitions. If there were, then perhaps we could arrive at a realistic, abstract, historical description of quantum dynamics by integrating (another metaphorical abuse of a mathematical term) the states in the configuration spaces over the set of partitions. But even if some such procedure actually produced a meaningful result, it still might not be useful or important. The mathematical structure might be too remote from anything we could observe or measure to be intelligible.

## VII COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS

I want to comment briefly on three errors sometimes found in discussions of quantum mechanics, often as a misrepresentation of Bohr’s explanation of the theory by those attacking or even those defending him.

“Two theories are needed in physics: classical physics for macroscopic and quantum mechanics for microscopic phenomena.”

Bohr’s terminology was a little unfortunate when he talked about the “classical” nature of the measuring apparatus. I think what he meant was that physics develops as a refinement of our ordinary experience with objects. The mathematical concepts of quantum theory are dynamical, not ontological, and we still need the objective aspect of historical description to give them meaning — the same objective aspect which was indistinguishable from the dynamical aspect of classical physics. Now we still use the same historical objective concepts to describe an experiment or observation even though the dynamical language is entirely different. For practical purposes, we use classical physics where it works, but there is no reason to think that a fully quantum analysis of any dynamical system would not give the correct answers if we could do the calculations.

Sometimes we use the geometrical structure of physical description to sharpen and criticize our ideas about what is really out there and what really happens; e.g., a pencil in a glass of water is not really broken at the water’s surface – the appearance is due to the refraction of light by water; similarly a rainbow is not really a multicolored ribbon spanning the sky – it is a trick of sunlight refracting through water droplets suspended in the air. This is the kind of refinement of description physics has always pursued. Newtonian mechanics made it appear reasonable to many that all phenomena could ultimately be reduced to an underlying geometrical structure of matter which would be the one true description of what was “really there.” Quantum physics has given up looking for that kind of geometrical ontology. We refine our description of objects as precisely as we can, and then quantum mechanics gives us the dynamical relations. There is no ground floor of quantum description which replaces the pragmatic description of ordinary objects. We have atoms and elementary particles which are useful for describing dynamical systems, their conserved quantities and degrees of freedom, but these are not fundamental in a historical/ontological sense. They are not mechanical components with individual well-defined locations and causal roles at every moment of time. This becomes obvious when we look at field theoretical descriptions of the quantum vacuum.

That we still need to base our description of quantum phenomena on observation of macroscopic objects is not a weakness or dilution of quantum mechanical principles. That was the whole idea of quantum dynamics from the very beginning when Heisenberg decided to represent dynamical variables by operators. When Bohr insisted that the quantum revolution was irreversible, that we could never return to classical physics by means of hidden variables or any other trick, he was affirming among other things that our experience with atomic physics had revealed what a sufficiently perspicacious natural philosopher might have realized anyway, that the historical and dynamical modes of description are independent (but complementary) and may take different forms. The quantum of action is the natural fault line between these two ways of looking at things.

“There are two kinds of quantum processes: the continuous evolution of quantum states according to the Schrödinger equation, punctuated by discontinuous collapse or projection events which occur when a measurement is made.”

From classical physics, we get the habit of thinking of a state as a state of being, independent of context. A quantum state is a dynamical relation defined within an objective context. The continuous evolution of the state is the evolution of interaction amplitudes based on prior objective information. A new measurement changes the context. If we are still considering after the measurement a dynamical relation mediated by the same or same type of particle (or set of particles), then it might be convenient to think of the new state as a projection of the prior state onto a subspace determined by eigenvalues of the observable measured. Actually, as I suggested in the previous section, the two states are defined on entirely different “tangent spaces.” Once this is understood, the Measurement Problem and associated paradoxes disappear. <sup>*</sup><sup>*</sup>*When people talk about the measurement problem, they focus on the last step in quantum dynamical analysis — the translation from the final quantum state (which may encompass many possible outcomes) to a particular objective result of the measurement. They forget about the first step — the translation from a unique objective situation to an abstract initial quantum state based on properties we consider relevant and can control or measure. There is a discontinuity in mode of description at both ends. The initial state is no more an objective ontological state of being than the final state.

Many of these paradoxes involve an infinite regression of contexts. Wigner’s friend looks at his apparatus and then Wigner asks his friend the result. If “measurement” causes the state to collapse, is Wigner’s friend in a superposition of states until he gives his answer? The superposition principle applies to dynamical states, not objects. The quantum state of the apparatus is generally irrelevant to the analysis of an experiment. We could in principle determine such a state, but first we would have to specify an objective context in which the apparatus functions as a carrier of dynamical influence. There might be many ways to specify the context, and each one result in a different state, but without any difference in the objective physical reality. It is not really meaningful to talk about the state of an object unless it is treated in our analysis as a dynamical system in an objective context. Meanwhile, an object is what it is — an object, not an abstraction.

If the answer is that simple (and my version is not very different from what many others have said or even from Bohr’s explanation in 1927) why is there still controversy after so many years? The emotional and intellectual appeal of the static geometrical picture of space-time and a mechanical view of matter should not be underestimated. If the world is a machine, then perhaps we can control it, especially if the watchmaker who made it is blind and cannot interfere (to use the peculiar metaphor in the title of a book by Richard Dawkins  — can the world be a mechanism without a design engineer, albeit an aimless one?) If the world is simply a collection of atoms in motion, then superstition is without basis; there can be no transcendent evil to fear, as Lucretius taught (but perhaps not much to value either). If the world is nothing but mathematical form, then our minds can penetrate to the ultimate foundation of things and we can escape the dreariness of mundane personal life by contemplating “the thoughts of God when he made the universe.” Of course, we can develop technology, rationally manage our environments, reject superstition, and find joy in Platonic contemplation no matter what physical theory happens to be true. But the spell of geometry and abstraction is powerful, and we can come to depend on it.

“Bohr’s view of quantum mechanics implies a shadowy, mystical picture of the world in which the mind of the observer influences events in occult ways and there is no objective independent physical reality.”

Classical physics encouraged the belief that whatever cannot be described mathematically does not exist. To Locke and others, the primary attributes of objects were geometrical. The physical world is simply a geometrical form realized in matter. Attributes or qualities which could not be described in this way were secondary – not existing in themselves but only in the subjectivity of the beholder. The more militant version of this view is that physical entities must not only be describable mathematically, they must be mathematical constructs. The universe must be founded on a mathematical ontology. To some, this became the meaning of “objective independent physical reality.”

I think only students who have invested a lot of time and effort studying classical mechanics are likely to be shocked to learn that quantum theory does not have such an ontology. It has only been since the 1970s that the general public (or even many physicists) had any idea there was a Problem of Reality in quantum physics. The indeterminacy of quantum dynamics made a little stir earlier in the century because of a possible connection with the classical philosophical problem of free will. Otherwise, relativity got all the press as the weird theory of 20th century physics.

In the 1950s it was received teaching that Bohr and von Neumann had solved all the conceptual and mathematical problems of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (cf. for example \[6, pp. 44–45\]. I doubt that many physicists really understood Bohr’s ideas or realized that Bohr’s treatment of measurement was radically different from von Neumann’s. (Bohr would never have assigned a quantum state to the measuring apparatus.) Perhaps the shift in the center of gravity of physics research from the Europe of Kant and Husserl to pragmatic North America did not help. Our physics departments are good at teaching formal theoretical methods and experimental techniques, but how to understand the connections between one set of concepts and the other is often left as an exercise for the student. Small wonder that the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics as given in textbooks in confused and perfunctory accounts of the Copenhagen Interpretation looked to students like a closet full of skeletons. The collision of rigid (because rarely examined) orthodoxy with playful revisionism generated a cadre of popularizers, who preached to the multitudes that quantum mechanics was strange in a very cool way, and that in fact perhaps all strange and cool things were linked to it. A pop language was created which popular writers from very different backgrounds were not slow to exploit.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. After Newton and the industrial revolution, classical physical terminology often appeared in common speech well out of its proper context, sometimes to legitimize outright frauds or fallacies (animal magnetism), sometimes as useful metaphor (social entropy, a team’s momentum in sports). Why not quantum leaps of achievement and economic superfluidity? Anything radically new seems magical, and so it becomes a metaphor for the magical bursts of insight which constitute the milestones and landmarks of human experience.

It remains true nonetheless that objectivity, solidity, and regularity are not compromised by quantum theory. The objectivity of physics comes from its grounding in experience. No formalism can dissolve or erase the basic truths of everyday experience. Schrödinger’s cat is definitely alive or dead, even if the quantum formalism can describe only its dynamical state, not its state of being. Physics gives a complete dynamical description of all phenomena — i.e., all causal links and transformations as measured physically. That doesn’t mean physics explains all higher level emergent phenomena (consciousness, culture, morality) or that it should be expected to. Nor does it provide an underlying ontology for reality in all its aspects .

There are still some hard cases for which our experience with microscopic processes gives us little help. Quantum dynamics presumes an objective context, but if we are interested in the dynamics of the universe as a whole in an early epoch in which the quantum properties of space-time itself dominate, then there is no conventional recipe for understanding what is going on. Perhaps the present is the objective context for the past. In any case, we should learn from past experience to expect answers only to questions we can put to the universe with action and observation, not with reason and imagination alone.