Adam Becker

OK, so another one, and this is really going to piss some people off if I describe this as a leading theory, but it totally is, and they're wrong.

There's so much controversy here.

There's so much drama.

This is a lot of what drew me to this.

Once I realized there's so much weird stuff in this area and this unresolved debate, I started wondering, OK, why is it unresolved?

And it turns out a lot of it has to do with just debate and interpersonal drama between really interesting people.

And then I tried to find a book about it, and I couldn't find one, so I wrote one.

Another leading theory is this thing, it goes by several different names, but I like to call it pilot wave theory.

It's this idea that when you're talking about where is that electron, it is in a place before you look.

And when you look,

You find it.

Here it is

there's a wave that's associated with each particle, and these waves sort of guide the motion of those particles.

And that wave is sort of associated with that wave function that we were talking about before.

And one of the things that really clued physicists in in the early 20th century to something really profoundly strange going on was that they found that things that they thought were waves sometimes acted like particles, and things that they thought were particles sometimes acted like waves.

Yeah.

So like something that you thought was in one place suddenly like started rippling outward like a wave.

Something that you thought propagated like a wave and could ripple out and do all those weird wave things suddenly was acting like a baseball.

Like it's just really weird.

So this is sort of a puzzle.