Wittgenstein, Feynman, and the Limits of Intuition and Objectivity in Quantum Theory
Reprinted from the American Philosophical Association Blog.
Richard Feynman, over the course of his long career, wanted to convince students and even the public that quantum theory does not make sense. In his 1965 textbook on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory for which he won the Nobel Prize, he wrote
The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is — absurd.
Feynman made several similar statements throughout his career and people often misinterpreted him as trying to outline a problem to be solved. But he wasn’t trying to tell us to figure it out at all. Unlike many of his contemporaries such as John Wheeler, David Bohm, Hugh Everett and his predecessor, Albert Einstein, Feynman was not interested in rescuing quantum physics from absurdity. Rather his goal was to stop people from trying to understand it in terms of their everyday intuition, at least until they gained a new one from learning the mathematics of quantum theory, the language of wavefunctions, path integrals, and operators. In this attitude Feynman was realist but pragmatic. He neither argued that an intuitive reality lurked underneath quantum theory…
