The Strangeness of the Quantum World

Quantum mechanics is famously strange and counter-intuitive, differing from what we might expect based on our everyday experiences. But what, exactly, lies at the core of this strangeness? The particle physicist Richard Feynman remarked that we seem to

have to walk "a logical tightrope" when we talk about a quantum system. I will explore what Feynman might have meant by this and why he brought the question of "logic" into the discussion of the implications of quantum theory. I will describe a way of thinking and talking about a quantum system, influenced by Feynman's perspective, in which we must pay careful attention to logic if we want to form a picture of the physical quantum world. And in which, maybe, quantum-ness is not as counter to everyday thinking as one might suppose.

About the speaker

Professor Fay Dowker did her PhD under the supervision of Professor Stephen Hawking in Cambridge, graduating in 1990. She did postdoctoral research in the astrophysics group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia Illinois, at University of California at Santa Barbara, and at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena California. She became a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London in 1999 before joining Imperial College London in 2003 where she is Professor of Theoretical Physics. Her research is on quantum gravity and the foundations of quantum mechanics.