Small World

Reading about the history of 20th century quantum physics is slowly becoming one of my favourite ways to kill time - am always excited by it because I feel like I might one day contribute to these thoughts as well!

Just found a nice, easy-to-read article on some of things which I /do/ understand - John Von Neumann's interpretation of the early theory in terms of the notion of a Hilbert space. As I read this article I found myself nodding along saying 'yes, yes, of course' and that is always a nice feeling - to know what the fuck is going on ...

Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics.