Science, philosophy and meaning - David Miller

[@kisho2679]

Can the current knowledge of quantum mechanics be compared to the situation before the heliocentric description of the solar system was developed, where complicated math was developed to calculate the celestial movements just to fit the observations (which after Copernicus and Newton turned out to be much easier)? Or why can't this comparison be justified?

[@davidmillermusic]

That's an interesting thought, but I'd say probably not, because, unlike the situation before the heliocentric view, in which calculations were very difficult because we had the wrong view of how things were working, the calculations in quantum mechanics are relatively straightforward. Our problem is not that the calculations are complicated; it's more that we don't understand why those should be the calculations; we don't really understand why we use Born's rule, but it is simple to use and works well. Anyway, this is all a matter of opinion!

[@kisho2679]

@@davidmillermusic Thank you. Actually, current math gets very complicated quite quickly as soon as we want to conduct calculations other than for the Hydrogen atom for the rest of the 117 chemical elements of the periodic table ..., e.g. computation of the spherical harmonics of Lanthanum.