Galileo advocated the heliocentric system in a socratic dialogue. Following the lifting of the Copenhagen view that quantum mechanics should not be interpreted, here is a dialogue about a way of looking at quantum theory that promotes progress and matches Einstein’s scepticism about God playing dice with the universe. Nothing could be more fundamental. We can predict properties of the electron to one part in a billion today, but we cannot predict its motion in an inhomogeneous magnetic field inside apparatus designed a century ago. That is embarrassing. Worse is that nobody is trying to predict its motion, because the successes of quantum theory in conjunction with its strangeness and 20th century metaphysics have led us to excuse its shortcomings. The speakers are Neo, a modern physicist who works in a different area, and Nino, a 19th century physicist who went to sleep in 1900 and recently awoke.
Anthony John Garrett