The Fifth International on Quantum Mechanics

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This was a major, major conference in 1927 in Belgium and all of the key players in the formulation of quantum mechanics are almost all of them were there. And this was sort of a great coming out party for the version of quantum mechanics that Heisenberg and Born and Boor and Paulie had cobbled together. It's still what we teach our students today. One of the rules is this thing called the Schrodinger equation, which is exactly the kind of thing that we love to have as a law of nature.

There are many mysteries surrounding quantum mechanics. To me, the biggest mysteries are why physicists haven’t yet agreed on a complete understanding of the theory, and even more why they mostly seem content not to try. This puzzling attitude has historical roots that go back to the Bohr-Einstein debates. Adam Becker, in his book What Is Real?, looks at this history, and discusses how physicists have shied away from the foundations of quantum mechanics in the subsequent years. We discuss why this has been the case, and talk about some of the stubborn iconoclasts who insisted on thinking about it anyway.

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Adam Becker received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan. He is currently a science writer and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at UC Berkeley. His book What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics comes out in paperback on Sept. 3, 2019.

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