Quantum Physics Breakthrough Claims
A new study proposes quantum mechanics can be described using only real numbers, matching energy predictions without imaginary components. Separately, researchers claim to have resolved black hole paradoxes and dark energy issues, reducing physics parameters from 26 to 2 with 26 million percent computation improvement, testable at LHC.
- The effort to describe quantum mechanics without imaginary numbers dates back to one of its founders, Erwin Schrödinger, who was puzzled by their appearance in his foundational equation and hoped a real-valued version would eventually be found. - In 2021, a study published in *Nature* by physicists including Miguel Navascués and Nicolas Gisin claimed that quantum theory based on real numbers could be experimentally falsified, suggesting complex numbers were a necessity. - The new research proposing a real-number-only quantum mechanics counters the 2021 falsification claims by introducing a different postulate for how to describe composite quantum systems, arguing this makes the use of complex numbers a matter of convenience, not a fundamental requirement. - The "black hole information paradox" originates from Stephen Hawking's discovery in the 1970s that black holes emit radiation and evaporate over time, which raised the question of what happens to the information of the matter that has fallen inside, as its destruction would violate a key principle of quantum mechanics. - Dark energy is a term for the unknown form of energy believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, counteracting the pull of gravity. - A long-standing goal in fundamental physics is to reduce the number of free parameters—constants that must be measured and manually input into a theory—as a lower number of parameters is seen as making a theory more predictive and fundamental. - While some theories predict the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could produce microscopic black holes, extensive searches have so far found no evidence of their existence up to an energy level of several teraelectronvolts (TeV).
