Physicists don’t know what the world is like, at bottom

I am not a philosopher of physics, nor do I play one on TV. So everything you are about to read should be taken with a grain of salt. Much better sources are to be found in the writings of Sabine Hossenfelder, or of my friend Jim Baggott, or of “Not Even Wrong” Peter Woit. Stuff by Lee Smolin is also pertinent.

The prompt for this essay came from a paper titled “Surveying the Attitudes of Physicists Concerning Foundational Issues of Quantum Mechanics,” co-authored by Sujeevan Sivasundaram and Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen. The first interesting observation is about the affiliations of the authors; Sivasundaram is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University in Denmark. Nielsen is affiliated with the Center for Science Studies at the same university. While I am often somewhat skeptical of “studies” programs, science studies, when well done, provide a valuable service to both the scientific community and the public at large, by shining a light on the inner workings of science, including its limitations and failures.

As the authors say in order to set the stage for their paper: “Even though quantum mechanics has existed for almost 100 years, questions concerning the foundation and interpretation of the theory still remain. These issues have gathered more attention in recent years, but does this mean that…