Walk me through this for a moment. If superpositions are illusory in that they are purely mathematical concepts that have no basis in physical reality, how does that square with the ongoing success of quantum information science and quantum computing, where it seems as if superpositions are a real physical phenomenon that can be leveraged, for instance, to do things that can’t be done classically?
Well, I think quantum technology is just what you get if you assume the reality of superimposed systems. What do I mean by that? We know superpositions in the macroscopic world are nonsense. That’s clear. And I believe, in the microscopic world, it’s clearly nonsense, too, even though it may seem we have nothing besides superpositions to use for understanding atoms. And I think what people in quantum technology probably don’t realize is that they’re doing the very converse of what they think they are doing. They think they’re understanding quantum mechanics. Instead I think what they should be doing is trying to remove the quantum mechanics from the description, trying to use more fundamental degrees of freedom, like those discrete states I mentioned.
They’re not asking the right questions, and that failure to do so makes things look more and more complicated—more and more quantum-mechanical—whereas, in reality, it shouldn’t be interpreted that way.
A prominent modern physicist espouses the idea that quantum mechanics is a form of giving up, just like Einstein said. I didn’t know this view was alive. (I don’t know enough to know who’s right.)