Neutrons on Classically Inexplicable Paths

Nice experiment, but they are still measuring neutrons, that are quite small. I don't understand why they try to sell this as a macroscopic experiment. Bell inecuality can be also measured at long distances, but it doesn't make it a macroscopic experiment.

Physicist working on QM here. At the macroscopic scale we are led to believe that the properties of a system have a value regardless of whether that value is “known” externally to the system. Then a measurement process would simply reveal the pre-existing value. But we can concoct a QM system such that it is impossible to assign a pre-existing value of a property in a consistent way (look for GHZ game to know more). This leads to true randomness in the most literal sense possible: there can exist no cause for a given value. That value materialized out of thin air.

It is my belief that there is no reason to believe that elementary particles are ever point-like objects with momentum and location.

They are fuzzy objects that always evolve in time according to wave equation. It's just that in case of very narrow, sharp waves they equation simplifies to Newtonian (or special relativity) equation of motion.

Measurement is just exchange of momentum and energy between that fuzzy objects that happens very quickly and in quantized amount and the equations governing it simplify for narrow, sharp waves to equations of two balls bouncing of each other.

Our intuitions developed for macroscopic objects which are a very peculiar form of matter, tightly bound by interactions, which make the constituent elementary particles very sharp and narrow all the time. They are just wrong for anything else. Newtonian mechanics is attractive because it's simple but it's equivalent of gas laws, that while very simple, only statistically capture the complexities of what actually happens in ideal gas and don't reflect nothing physically real.

There are many kinds of quantum weirdness. One of them is this: we think classically of the past as definite and the future in terms of possibilities- but in reality both the future and the past are indeterminate in exactly the same way (it’s just that typically there are a lot more possible futures for the current state than pasts, because of entropy). In fact you could define the past as being the direction in configuration space with the smallest uncertainty, and the future as being the direction with the most uncertainty. In this view, at the Big Bang since there is no direction with less uncertainty, there is no past at that point.

That’s not the only quantum weirdness, but it’s a big one.

Centimeter sized neutron beams are not really macroscopic because neutrons in them are not interacting with each other. Macroscopic objects consists of huge number of elementary particles that connect through interactions.

I loved this theory when I first heard about it.

It makes intuitive sense to me, even though it is hardly possible from some perspectives with what we know today.

The more I read the more interesting it gets.

Does this rule out pilot wave theory, in which a particle always has a definite position at all times?