Sean Carroll: preference

Transcript context

…You wrote the book Something Deeply Hidden on the mysteries of quantum mechanics and a new book coming out soon, part of that, Biggest Ideas in the Universe series we mentioned called Quanta and Fields. That’s focusing on quantum mechanics. Big question first, biggest ideas in the universe, what to you is most beautiful or perhaps most mysterious about quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is a harder one. I wrote a textbook on general relativity, and I started it by saying, “General relativity is the most beautiful physical theory ever invented.” And I will stand by that. It is less fundamental than quantum mechanics, but quantum mechanics is a little more mysterious. It’s a little bit kludgy right now. If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world. It depends on what you mean by beauty, but I think that the answer to your question is quantum mechanics can start with extraordinarily austere, tiny ingredients and in principle lead to the world. That boggles my mind. It’s much more comprehensive. General relativity is about gravity, and that’s great. Quantum mechanics is about everything and seems to be up to the task. And so I don’t know, is that beauty or not? But it’s certainly impressive. Both for the theory, the predictive power of the theory and the fact that the theory describes tiny things creating everything we see around us.…

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