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What are some faults and unproven theories in Quantum physics?

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  • 1 year later...

There are lots of seemingly simple problems in quantum information theory that are very hard to solve and many open questions. The amazing thing is that this is all for finite degrees of freedom, often just for two or three states; we are really dealing with 'bog-standard' linear algebra! Who would have thought there would be open problems left with matrices!

  • 4 weeks later...

I can't think of ten off the top of my head, but quantum gravity and Vacuum catastrophe would count as one.

 

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I can't think of ten off the top of my head, but quantum gravity and Vacuum catastrophe would count as one.

 

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Incompatible with Relativity.

 

Incorrect prediction of the Higgs boson mass.

 

Failure to determine the YangMills theory with a finite mass gap exist.

 

Lot of unanswered questions regarding cosmic inflation.

 

Horizon problem.

 

Electroweak horizon problem.

 

Quantum gravity.

 

No explanation for the baryon asymmetry.

 

Cosmological constant problem.

 

Foundational problems.

 

No unification of particles and forces.

 

Inability to give rise to reality, such as the superposition of states, wavefunction collapse, quantum decoherence, what constitutes a measurement.

 

Vacuum catastrophe.

 

The tuning problem. How the values of the free constants are chosen in nature.

 

After ~150 years, still no ToE, theory of everything.

 

 

Addition: one of my own great dislikes for Quantum Mechanics is renormalization. Feynman, among a lot of well-known scientists including Dirac were huge critic against renormalization. Dirac said he was very dissatisfied with renormalization. Feynman wrote the following in 1985:

 

"The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate."

 

Of course that's regarding QFT, which in an informal sense is an extension of quantum mechanics.

After ~150 years, still no ToE, theory of everything.

 

I don't think that's strange. How does that work, otherwise? 'Lets go and understand EVERYTHING in 150 years.' Yeah, right.

This explains what's generally included in ToE:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Everything

 

Still doesn't mean it's doable in 150 years. Then there's also the problem that while you try to construct a theory of everything, you may discover new things which then have to fit in the theory as well. This can make 150 years a little on the short side.

 

Don't underestimate the complexity of reality.

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