A radical new interpretation of quantum mechanics is offered here. Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Oxford, Vlatko Vedral, argues that everything in the universe is a quantum wave. The difficulty of uniting the classical world and the quantum world is overcome; everything is quantum, and the quantum gives rise to the classical. His theory also overcomes the measurement problem, the observer problem, and the problem of quantum entanglement (spooky action at a distance). Poof goes the classical world!

There are, I believe, two main reasons why physics seems stuck at present. The last revolution was quantum mechanics and it began with Heisenberg’s famous paper exactly 100 years ago. And since then, not a single experiment has challenged the quantum description of reality. Not one. The first reason for this century-long absence of a new fundamental theory is that we simply haven’t had the appropriate experimental technology to probe regions where something could go wrong. This has now changed rapidly with the ongoing worldwide race to build a universal quantum computer. The technologies that go into this enterprise and that are being pursued by all the major industrial players are becoming sophisticated enough to test fundamental physics in a non-trivial way. However, there is a second reason for being stuck. It is the fact that we still haven’t agreed on the way to understand quantum mechanics. It is for this reason that I’d like to offer my own interpretation. Some might see it as radical, but it seems to me that it is the only one that fits all the experimental evidence and theoretical constraints so far

So let me start at the beginning. Quantum interpretations resemble the First World War battlefield. All warring sides are deeply entrenched, and there is remarkably little movement and activity to succeed in changing the frontlines between different territories. The dominant view is still the Copenhagen Interpretation (originally promoted by Niels Bohr), which probably occupies half of the landscape of all interpretations. According to Copenhagen, quantum systems need classical observers to interact with them and reduce quantum superpositions (“being in many different states at the same time”) to one well-defined “classical” state.

The other half of the landscape is then the battleground for the Many Worlds Interpretation, the Hidden Variables Interpretation, and a number of other smaller competitors, such as Quantum Bayesianism (affectionately known as QBism). Without going into too much detail, the proponents of Hidden Variables (originators: Louis de Broglie and David Bohm) try to hold onto a classical reality, but at a price of introducing action at a distance (things that go faster than light, but cannot be detected); the QBists (originating in the work of Carlton Caves, Christopher Fuchs and Ruediger Schack) claim that quantum physics exists only in the heads of observers; finally, the Many Worlders (starting with Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett) take the idea of quantum superpositions to be universal and to apply not just to quantum systems but to everything else in the universe.

Now, when I told my editor at Allen Lane about my own interpretation, he immediately said “It’s Many Worlds on steroids!” There is a grain of truth in that, but I prefer to call it “Everything is a Quantum Wave Interpretation” instead. It’s best to tell you what it is straight away and demark it against the other views as we go along.