Einstein's unfinished revolution - Lee Smolin

'Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory ever
formulated. The only problem with it, argues Lee Smolin, is that it is
wrong ... a fount of provocative ideas ... lucid, upbeat and, finally,
optimistic' Graham Farmelo, Nature

Human beings, says Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble With Physics,
have always had a problem with the
boundary between reality and
fantasy, confusing our representations of
the world with the world
itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in
quantum physics, which
forms the basis for our understanding of
everything from elementary
particles to the behaviour of materials.

While
quantum
mechanics is currently our best theory of nature at an atomic
scale, it
has many puzzling qualities - qualities that preclude realism
and
therefore give an incomplete description of nature. Rather than
question this version of quantum mechanics, however, whole groups of
physicists have embraced it as correct and rejected realism.
Subscribing
to a kind of magical thinking, they believe that what is
real is far
beyond the world we perceive: indeed, that the 'true' world
is hidden
from our perception.

Back in the 1920s Einstein, both
a realist
and a physicist, believed that it was necessary to go beyond
quantum
mechanics to discover what was missing from a true theory of
the atoms.
This was Einstein's unfinished mission, and it is Lee
Smolin's too.

Not
only will this new model of quantum physics
form the basis of solutions
to many of the outstanding problems of
physics, but, crucially, it is a
theory that is realist in nature. At a
time when science is under
attack, and with it the belief in a real
world in which facts are either
true or false, never has the importance
of building science on the
correct foundations been more urgent.