A lost Schrödinger manuscript reveals a twist in quantum physics

"Weird" is underselling it.

The problems are in their interpretation and in the interpretation of much of the formalism of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

There are far more possible interpretations that match the known experimental facts than it would appear from university textbooks.

The problem is that for now it is not possible to decide which of them is right, because nobody has been able to work out their complete consequences by creating a complete coherent quantum theory.

There are a lot of alternative interpretations that sound more plausible than the mainstream interpretation, but none of them has been developed enough to be able to prove that they could explain everything.

This is a subject that requires a book-length treatment. There are actually some such books, but they only show the very serious flaws of the mainstream interpretation of quantum theory, without being able to propose an adequate complete replacement. Criticism is always easier than discovering a better solution.

The only certitude is that the current quantum mechanics/quantum field theory are not the final theories of physics and whoever believes that physics is solved is as naive as those who believed the same thing at the end of the 19th century.

Nonetheless, nowadays the distinction between bosons and fermions is one of the most important facts of physics, as important as the fact that there exists a maximum velocity. The structure of all matter depends in an essential way on this fact.

So the memory of Bose might be preserved forever, whenever bosons are mentioned.

Besides physics texts, Schrödinger has also written some more philosophical texts, which are very good and which show much more common sense than for many other physicists, past or present. The qualities of those texts seem quite incompatible with a deviant personality, like that of a paedophile.

In the absence of any concrete evidence, with all accusations based just on vague hearsay, I believe that it is much more likely that an accuser who has never done anything worthwhile is wrong, either non-intentionally or intentionally, than that the accused person, with a lifetime of great achievements, is guilty.

Moreover, even if the accusations of relations with young girls had been true, calling him a "paedophile" would not have been necessarily correct. What is classified as a paedophile in modern USA was not necessarily classified as such in other countries one century ago. In the past most European countries had much lower ages of consent than today, typically as low as 14 years.

"The guy was a paedophile and justified it" is a false sentence, because he certainly never admitted such a thing. The accusations were made post-mortem, based on hearsay, when he was no longer able to defend himself.

By "aggregate macro level" I mean the averaging out of aggregate probabilities of multitudes of random events. This is what gives rise to an emergent predictability and determinism which we perceive as certainty. One way to understand this is; For any one event its aggregate probabilities must sum to one thus making it certain within its outcome space. This is carried forward when you consider (as you put it) "a combinatorial explosion" of multitudes of random events.

> You also imply (I think) that there is a finite space (bounded) for a variable to range in. Analogous to an LLM spanning and recombining its training materials. But what of the infinite - the unknown ?

Your comparison of random variables in quantum theory with random variables in LLMs is a bit far-fetched but there certainly are some parallels in the usage of probability distributions in a information-theoretic sense (including infinity).

> Of course one might say that we as hoominz are similarly bounded - that we are a variety of wetware LLM, limited by our own training materials (i.e. genes + sensory inputs + generated mental experiences).

W.r.t. Humans vs. LLMs one needs to bring together; a) A study of Language as being indistinguishable from the "Reality" it describes. b) A study of psychological theories like "Self-Determination Theory" (SDT), "Operant Conditioning", "Behaviourism" and finally, c) Neurobiology which gives rise to what we call "emergent Consciousness". Humans are not just a variety of "wetware LLM".

> But being of a spiritual bent myself, I ask: Where is the foot in the door for the divine ? Knocking at the door of fundamental unknowability - as you say, "unpredictable and indeterministic at the quantum micro level". If there is an intangible, immaterial element to our existence - call it a "soul" - then we might have identified the interface where "the rubber meets the road".

Now we are in the philosophical realm. At the human level we have the various schools of philosophy of which the dualistic Hindu school of "Samkhya" is a good model to study and seek mappings from. According to this school, there is a constant/unchanging/attributeless "Consciousness" (which in materialistic science we can map to an "Emergent Property" of a complex system that is the total Human Organism) and no "divinity" outside of you. Complementing it is the "External Reality" which includes everything else both material(matter etc.)/immaterial(your thoughts/feelings etc.) and which is constantly changing/evolving dynamically over time. It is said that "Consciousness Observes/Witnesses Reality".

This directly parallels quantum theory where the Observer and the Object are entangled into one system during the act of Observation/Measurement though they are separate. This entanglement is what you could call (roughly) "The Mind" where you build Reality i.e. collapse of the possibilities into a single result.

The above is one of the reasons that most Quantum Physicists were quite enamoured of and studied the various Hindu schools of philosophy since there were many parallels here.

Finally, at the Physics level see the excellent "Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg" for a nice exploration.