Some Quantum Mechanics, Its Problems, and How Not to Think About Them

Abstract

QM is notoriously associated with a certain ‘strangeness’ or ‘weirdness’ (e.g. Rosenblum and Kuttner 2011, p. 4; Davies 2004, p. 11) which stems, in the first place, from the divergence of the phenomena that it describes and predicts from our pre-quantum expectations. By ‘phenomenon’ we here mean, for practical reasons, something along the lines of Bogen and Woodward (1988, pp. 305–306), according to whom the phenomenon is rather what the theory predicts, which may not even be observable, whereas the data are the observables that serve as evidence for phenomena.