From Peter Standen
I greatly enjoyed Matthew Chalmers’s article on the subjective nature of reality and how “quantum weirdness is all in the mind” (10 May, p 32). The same problem of subjectivity arises in psychology when theorists tie themselves in knots trying to relate abstractions such as intelligence or personality to everyday experience.
Quantum theory cannot “make sense” without a human to make sense of it. What a scientist’s apparatus registers while they are unable to record it is unknowable and therefore scientifically meaningless. Quantum theory comes up with “the right answer” because people have struggled hard to make it that way.
As David Mermin says in the article, “it really is that simple”, just as long as we remember that theories are human constructions and imperfect for that.
Darlington, Western Australia
