Quantum Foundations: Conclusions

For centuries, scientists have used evidence and reason to understand the natural world. They assumed, at least tacitly, that the “natural world” exists on its own with no need for observers (Bunge 2001, 1999, 1967; Romero 2018). The ideas of subjective idealists such as Bishop Berkley (Chapter 3 ), who believed things exist only when they are perceived, were not influential at the time. (Bracken 1965). But during the twentieth century, the conundrums of QP proved so severe that many physicists abandoned trying to interpret the theory in a normal realistic manner. Interpretations such as consciousness-causes-collapse, the participatory universe, and QBism, depart sharply from traditional scientific realism, and the Copenhagen interpretation leans in this direction. Other interpretations, such as the many worlds interpretation, claim to be realistic but are based on hypotheses that cannot, even in principle, be confirmed experimentally. None of this is necessary. Now that there is a consensus about the reality of nonlocality, there are no longer grounds for assuming that QP harbors gaps or inconsistencies requiring the theory to be interpreted in subjective or otherwise non-scientific ways. In particular, issues concerning wave-particle duality, the reality of quantum fields, the reality of quantum states, and presumed paradoxes such as the 2-slit experiment, quantum randomness, superpositions, entanglement, nonlocality, and the detection problem, have been satisfactorily resolved within standard QP. QP is healthy and logically consistent; neither modifications nor special interpretations are needed. This chapter summarizes these longstanding issues and their resolutions.