James' World 2

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By the spring of 2020, the high stakes involved in rigorous, timely, and honest statistics had suddenly become all too clear. A new coronavirus was sweeping the world. Politicians had to make their most consequential decisions in decades, and fast. Many of those decisions depended on data detective work that epidemiologists, medical statisticians, and economists were scrambling to conduct. Tens of millions of lives were potentially at risk. So were billions of people’s livelihoods.

In early April, countries around the world were a couple of weeks into lockdown, global deaths passed 60,000, and it was far from clear how the story would unfold. Perhaps the deepest economic depression since the 1930s was on its way, on the back of a mushrooming death toll. Perhaps, thanks to human ingenuity or good fortune, such apocalyptic fears would fade from memory. Many scenarios seemed plausible. And that’s the problem.

An epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, wrote in mid-March that Covid-19 “might be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco”. The data detectives are doing their best – but they’re having to work with data that’s patchy, inconsistent, and woefully inadequate for making life-and-death decisions with the confidence we would like.

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Some of the most perplexing topics in physics revolve around quantum theory. The quandary is seen most famously in the Schrödinger’s cat question and the issue of information loss in black hole evaporation. Richard Feynman said, “I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Most physicists have just gotten used to it. There’s no doubt quantum theory is successful at the practical level. But when considering it as more than a tool for calculating probabilities for possible outcomes of experiments in the laboratory, and taking it as a fundamental description of the “world out there,” it faces serious conceptual problems.

The basic problem is that quantum theory seems to be about what we measure and not about what is out there in the world. One might think this is just fine, as the theory represents just “our information” about the world. But that would make sense only if there were something about the world that we can be informed of, which must be, in general situations, specified by the theory. Understanding how to deal with this conceptual problem requires us to look at the theory in more detail.

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