Recently I have an idea, that is going to study quantum mechanics and then find some new philosophical breakthroughs or invent some new set of philosophical ideas based on the knowledge of quantum mechanics.
But I don’t know any people who study this, since this is a philosophical forum and many people here are very knowledgable, so I wrote this thread to find some information.
What do people who study quantum mechanics do? What kind of jobs do they find? Does that job allow his or her to use the knowledge to invent some philosophical theories?
(In the past I saw a job ad that recuite students who study this to an observatory. But of course I don’t know what the kind of job they really do in an observatry. )
They read popular science magazines on their couches in their nice homes in the evening after eight hours at the office doing math.
Not a bad deal really. You’ll pay your tuition debts off in the first couple years with your salary and be a homeowner by the time you’re thirty if you get right into a job after graduate school.
Thanks, do they have time to develop their own philosophical theories? Since they work in the lab, they can use the equipment to do their own research, am I right?
Absolutely. As soon as you see how things behave on a quantum scale, you will understand that nature is a queer thing… and weird things happen to queer things. I don’t mean to say that the universe is gay… don’t misunderstand me. I would never say such a mean thing. I mean to say that weird things having to do with cognition and precognition and intuition and synchronicity and prediction might be somehow causally understood if we knew how it all worked.
Quantum weirdness should be a subject philosophers of every school are aware of. This is the cutting edge of science, Auos.
I mean who wouldn’t let someone who claimed “the moon isn’t there when nobody is looking at it” be a philosopher? A physicist said this, a sirius one, and if you were a sirius physicist and said something like that, you earned some sirius philosophical popularity and rank.
So you mean quantum physics is just a scam?
BTW, Could a quantum physicist use the scientific equipments in the observatry or lab for personal research?
I wish to study it and then become a quantum physicist, if in the end I became a quantum physicist I wish to develop my own philosophical theories. Is my wish realistic?
Generally t BA level Quantum Mechanics is just a part of a physics degree. If you want to be a cutting edge quantum mechanic, you are definitely going to have to take this to PHD level. Of course this is a realistic, the main barrier is that it involves a huge amount of self motivation and hard work and most people lack the gumption to succeed in this kind of field.
People with physics degrees often do MAs in some form of engineering or something like that. I wouldn’t worry too much about job opportunities, there are tonnes of good jobs these days around for people from most backgrounds.
I read “Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality”. Not a bad book although it spends far too long on an autobiography of Einstein and Bohr in the first half (the second half is more ‘sciency’ which is better), although that might be of interest to you I suppose as you want to follow in their footsteps.
It definitely gives you an overview of quantum mechanics as a field.
With QM, there is a massive difference between 1) doing fairly straightforward applications of a mathematical formalism that has a deeply statistical character inside of a laboratory setting upon phenomena such as light and the nuclear forces, and 2) trying to shoehorn said formalism into some kind of philosophically naive “interpretation” of something called objective reality so that we can think of ourselves as having some deep understanding of the “true” nature of things.
In the first case, you are dealing with working, credentialed scientists employed at highly respected institutions who know of what they speak, and in the second case, well… not so much!
If I may be so free to philosophize the problem: entanglement not only suggests but makes it inevitable that identity precedes mass. Mass precludes communications faster than the speed of light. The assumption on the whole is that the info needs to be communicated. But what appears to be the case is that the two particles are fundamentally still parts of the same thing, a thing so stable in its nature that a separation of parts throughout space does not affect its coherency.
It kind of reminds me of how exactly wolves coordinate their encircling of a prey in a circle of several miles radius, or how discoveries are made within the same species of birds at the same time on two sides of the planet. Not that these necessarily violate the speed of light, they just violate the ‘bouncing object’ model we still have of causality, which even lives on in the idea that the speed of light is a limit in all forms of causality. Apparently this is not the case. Causes can be non local.
