After all, the First Quantum Revolution had been so successful that nobody would waste time in considering questions about the very fundamental concepts at the basis of QM. In the first decades of the theory, such attitude was the common one, well summarised by the motto "Shut up and calculate!" coined by Mermin about the Copenhagen Interpretation. Dirac himself suggested to “not be bothered with them (i.e., foundational matters) too much”. ![]() For several years many physicists (with few exceptions including Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Max Born) ignored the deep meaning of QP, avoiding to interpret what the theory is telling us about the world and focussing on the successful results that it allowed them to achieve. Instead, it has somewhat willingly moved away from them and produced Quantum Mechanics (QM), a theoretical framework with a minimal set of ingredients that describes the behaviour of quantum physical systems, in the sense that it predicts outcomes of experiments without delving more than necessary into philosophical disquisitions. Yet, research in physics has not been stopped by several far-from-understood philosophical aspects and implications. We may thus dare say that QP is philosophically, rather than mathematically, difficult. Maybe it will surprise you, but the main reason is not its mathematical language, which mostly involves linear algebra the greater difficulties may be rather attributed to the fact that QP forces us to abandon many of our assumptions and preconceptions of how reality is like - or, perhaps, how we would like it to be like -, making it highly counterintuitive and, at times, uncomfortable. Quantum Physics (QP) carries the reputation of being a notoriously difficult subject.
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