Do we really understand quantum mechanics?

Excerpt

As a book on the foundations of quantum theory, Franck Laloë’s Do we really understand quantum mechanics? (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is particularly valuable in that it pays good attention to a range of newly observed physical effects as well as discussing the long-known thought experiments central to the subject [1]. It is a book for physicists that considers a number of differing interpretations of the theory and possible modifications to its standard form that might offer added insight into quantum effects. Similarly, the book manages to consider not only various well known theorems, as is typically done, but also less well known theorems and details of the related physical processes. It treats a number of experimental situations to which the somewhat controversial notion of measurement [2] can be applied and in which it can be scrutinized. These include collapse-like processes, the so-called “weak measurements,” and continual measurements; an entire chapter of the book is devoted to experiments in which quantum state projections are said to take place, such as those involving a single particle where “quantum jumps are visible in real time.” This is one of the several indications that one finds in the text of the realist tendency natural to physicists that supplements the author’s more obvious admiration for the Copenhagen interpretation, evident in its description as “one of the biggest achievements of all science” ([1], p. 37). …