First Interpretations

It happens more often than you might expect: people do not question the validity of an assumption that has become generally accepted. Indeed, they are often blind to its existence and therefore, the existence of alternatives.

I was reading a few pages of Wheeler's Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam when an interesting thought occurred to me. I was reading about the famous double slit experiment and the common explanation of its results. Namely, that a photon follows all possible paths until it is measured, and only in the act of measurement (or "registration" as Bohr preferred) is it position determined. This is widely considered to be strange and it really bothers a lot of people, myself included. I can't help wondering that there is another interpretation of the results and we are all blinded to an original assumption that has unfairly eliminated other options.

As an example of this blindness via commonality I offer a story from one of my co-workers: When he first started at the company he was called out to one of our manufacturing sites to try and resolve a problem. He had only been called after virtually everyone at this other site had tried to resolve the dilemma and failed.

The problem revolved around a large piece of equipment. The personnel at this manufacturing site needed to lift this piece of equipment and place it in the submarine. The unit had several bolts along the top edges of its sides and they had two pieces of angle iron that were supposed to be affixed to the unit via these bolts. The equipment would then be lifted by the angle iron and set into place.

Unfortunately, the holes in the angle iron didn't line up with the bolts on the unit and the angle iron seemed to be too short. Now, this problem had run through the workers, engineers, and management at this site like wildfire as it was causing a significant holdup on construction and time was wasting, not to mention a lot of money. When my co-worker got to the site there were roughly 15 people standing around the equipment scratching their heads. They showed him that the angle iron holes indeed did not match up to the bolts on the equipment.

He looked at the equipment looked at the angle iron and told them to try the other two sides. Turns out they were holding the angle iron up to the 3 ft sides and trying to line the bolts up. Of course, they didn't as the angle iron was supposed to go on the 2 ft sides.

Now, I don't know exactly how true this story is, but I personally don't doubt the gist.

Think this is just a quaint example and that such common blindness could never strike the entire physics community? Well it has in the past, just think about the great follies of the past: the mythical ether and the belief that all the theory was done (at least until Einstein came along). Of course, past performance is no real indication of the future (as they say in the stock market). However, I can't help shake the feeling that we're missing some key point and one day someone will come by and tell us to try the far side and we'll all feel really silly when they are correct.