Check out this piece in Nature, on a level of connection beneath quantum chaos.
Returning to Einstein's nagging doubts about quantum mechanics, Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University has begun to outline a way in which its apparent play of chance might be underpinned by precise physical laws that describe the way the world works
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According to this view, our ignorance about the nature of a quantum object is illusory; we just haven't found the right theory to describe it yet.
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This might sound like sleight of hand to introduce quantum uncertainty, but 't Hooft has outlined a way to turn it into a predictive mathematical theory. He thinks that there may be two classes of properties that we can measure.
One type he calls beables - from 'be-ables'. These remain as precisely defined on laboratory scales of time and distance as they are on the Planck Scale. The other type, that he dubs changeables, are not really observable properties at all; rather, they tell us how a system behaves if you make a small change somewhere. Changeables look like the observables in standard quantum mechanics, but they get scrambled and blurred when we try to measure them.
This seems to be that level of physics where we're talking more about how we conceive of things than the things we're perceiving. I'm wondering how much of this is just our drive to determine Natural Law. I'm also wondering if this could signal a big fat paradigm shift out of Chaos and into Order. |
