Welcome to the renaissance of quantum mechanics

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

It took more than a hundred years, but physicists finally woke up, looked quantum mechanics into the face – and realized with bewilderment they barely know the theory they’ve been married to for so long. Gone are the days of “shut up and calculate”; the foundations of quantum mechanics are en vogue again.

It is not a spontaneous acknowledgement of philosophy that sparked physicists’ rediscovered desire; their sudden search for meaning is driven by technological advances.

With quantum cryptography a reality and quantum computing on the horizon, questions once believed ephemeral are now butter and bread of the research worker. When I was a student, my prof thought it questionable that violations of Bell’s inequality would ever be demonstrated convincingly. Today you can take that as given. We have also seen delayed-choice experiments, marveled over quantum teleportation, witnessed decoherence in action, tracked individual quantum jumps, and cheered when Zeilinger entangled photons over hundreds of kilometers of distance. Well, some of us, anyway.

But while physicists know how to use the mathematics of quantum mechanics to make stunningly accurate predictions, just what this math is about has remained unclear. This is why physicists currently have several “interpretations” of quantum mechanics.

More here.