The Quantum Reality Map
— A look at the philosophy of quantum theory by Andrew Paterson—12/2004

With the recent release of the film "What The Bleep Do We Know?", quantum mechanics is once again in the public imagination, as it was 80 years ago when it was first formulated. The film presents quantum mechanics as scientific justification for our minds literally creating our reality, but this position has been criticized for not being scientifically accurate. Here is a short rundown of the philosophy of quantum theory.

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"As fantastic as it may sound, the 'new physics' called quantum mechanics posits that there exists, side by side with this world, another world, a parallel universe, a duplicate copy that is somehow slightly different and yet the same. And not just two parallel worlds, but three, four, and even more. No less than an infinite number of them. In each of these universes, you, I, and all the others who live, have lived, will live, will have ever lived, are alive."
Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.,
Starwave: Mind, Consciousness, and Quantum Physics

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." Wolfgang Pauli on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague.

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"QUANTUM MECHANICS is an oxymoron: in microscopic world of quanta or packets of energy for which it was originally formulated, reality is anything but mechanistic. It is more appropriate to called it quantum theory or, more usefully, the quantum reality map. The only reason it was called quantum mechanics is because it superseded Newtonian mechanics.

Quantum theory was first formulated to predict events in the atomic and subatomic world. Prediction is, after all, what physical laws and theories are for — if a map doesn't predict the territory, one soon gets lost. In the classical model of reality it was thought that, with the right map, predictions of atomic events would be perfectly accurate. However, much to everyone's surprise, the quantum map that was developed was fuzzy, statistical and quirky - - "
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